Patent ID: 7778247

Claim:
A method of allocating wireless subcarrier bandwidth, comprising: defining a bipartite graph having first and second disjoint node sets; assigning users to the first set of nodes such that each node of the first set of nodes is assigned to only one user; assigning each sub-carrier to one and only one node of a second set of nodes; using edges, connecting each node of the first set of nodes to every node of the second set of nodes; weighting each edge using a value produced from a subcarrier-dependent and rate-dependent utility function; numerically ordering unique edge weightings such that each unique edge weighting has at least one adjacent edge weighting and at least some of the unique edge weightings have a duplicate edge weighting that is not ordered; for duplicate edge weightings identifying a perturbation factor between adjacent unique edge weightings; perturbing all duplicate weightings by a random variable which is greater than zero and less than the perturbation factor; and using a message passing algorithm to allocate data rates and subcarriers to users.