Patent ID: 8743719

Claim:
A method for allocating network data rates to a plurality of mobile terminals through which users access possibly different applications through a network having a certain limited total bandwidth to allocate, said method comprising: using as an input to an optimizing operation a quality utility function which indicates for a certain application the quality perceived by a user depending on the allocated data rate, preferably further also depending on the channel condition, performing said optimizing operation such that it calculates a combined quality measure based on the quality utility functions for the different applications and for different possible resource allocations to the plurality of applications in such a way that said quality measure is optimized by finding among the plurality of possible resource allocations the resource allocation for which said quality measure reaches an extremum, to thereby obtain an overall optimized resource allocation for the network, wherein said combined quality measure is based on: adding for a certain application and for a certain allocated data rate the corresponding user perceived quality level of said application resulting from the allocated rate and the corresponding penalty parameter resulting from the change of quality, to thereby obtain for said certain application a penalized quality indicator; obtaining a combined quality measure by adding up the penalized quality indicators obtained for said plurality of applications; calculating said combined quality measure for a plurality of different possible resource allocations to said plurality of applications, and obtaining the one of said plurality of resource allocations for which said combined quality measure reached an extremum as the optimized resource allocation, wherein said method further comprises: applying said optimizing operation such that it uses a penalty parameter in such a way that it penalizes a resource allocation for which the amount of deviation of the user perceived quality from a user perceived quality in the past at one or more of said mobile terminals would exceed a certain threshold compared to another resource allocation for which the amount of deviation of the user perceived quality from the user perceived quality in the past does not exceed said certain threshold.