Utility max-min fair rate allocation for multiuser multimedia communications

Abstract

In this paper, we study the rate allocation problem among multiuser multimedia communications. Two essential objectives, efficiency and fairness, are often considered. The efficiency concerns how to maximize the sum of video qualities over all users, and the fairness concerns the video quality differences among users. Generally, increasing the efficiency and keeping the fairness are inconsistent. Towards this problem, we design a utility function by taking both the video quality and the allocated rate into consideration. Then, we propose a utility max-min fair rate allocation scheme, which can achieve a good tradeoff between the efficiency and the fairness. The simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed scheme. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.