Min flow rate maximization for software defined radio access networks

We consider a cloud-based heterogeneous network of base stations (BSs) connected via a backhaul network of routers and wired/wireless links with limited capacity. The optimal provision of such networks requires proper resource allocation across the radio access links in conjunction with appropriate traffic engineering within the backhaul network. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for joint resource allocation across the wireless links and flow control over the entire network. The proposed algorithm, which maximizes the min-rate among all the transmitted commodities, is based on a decomposition approach that leverages both the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and the weighted-MMSE (WMMSE) algorithm. We show that this algorithm is easily parallelizable and converges globally to a stationary solution of the joint optimization problem. The proposed algorithm can also be extended to networks with multi-antenna nodes and other utility functions.