Jointly optimal congestion and contention control based on network utility maximization

Abstract

We study joint end-to-end congestion control and per-link medium access control (MAC) in ad-hoc networks. We use a network utility maximization formulation, in which by adjusting the types of utility functions, we can accommodate multi-class services as well as exploit the tradeoff between efficiency and fairness of resource allocation. Despite the inherent difficulties of non-convexity and non-separability of the optimization problem, we show that, with readily-verifiable sufficient conditions, we can develop, a distributed algorithm that converges to the globally and jointly optimal rate allocation and persistence probabilities.