An Approximation Result for a Bandwidth Allocation Problem

Abstract

Recent advances in communication technologies have made it possible the integration of heterogeneous traffics of different bandwidths in a single broadband network, achieving the flexibility and the economic advantage of sharing a network. In such a situation, if no traffic access control is exerted, the network resources, such as network bandwidth, will be occupied unfairly resulting in a low throughput usage of the network. Thus, it is needed a traffic control strategy that allocates the network bandwidth fairly to achieve maximum throughput [6]. We consider a radio network where the transmitters request consecutive frequency slots (bandwidth) to transmit their messages of different traffic classes, such as voice, data, video. The problem is to allocating bandwidths to transmitters in order to minimize the overall network bandwidth requirement, and it is called Bandwidth Allocation (BA) problem.