Characterization of the weak Pareto boundary of resource allocation problems in wireless networks -- Implications to cell-less systems

Abstract: We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a network configuration to provide utilities that are both fair and efficient in a well-defined sense. To cover as many applications as possible with a unified framework, we consider utilities defined in an axiomatic way, and the constraints imposed on the feasible network configurations are expressed with a single inequality involving a monotone norm. In this setting, we prove that a necessary and sufficient condition to obtain network configurations that are efficient in the weak Pareto sense is to select configurations attaining equality in the monotone norm constraint. Furthermore, for a given configuration satisfying this equality, we characterize a criterion for which the configuration can be considered fair for the active links. We illustrate potential implications of the theoretical findings by presenting, for the first time, a simple parametrization based on power vectors of achievable rate regions in modern cell-less systems subject to practical impairments.