Joint opportunistic user scheduling and power allocation: throughput optimisation and fair resource sharing

Despite extensive studies on optimal power allocation, how to design an efficient joint user scheduling and power allocation scheme for uplink multiuser networks remains largely unexplored. This study investigates joint opportunistic user scheduling and power allocation in uplink multiuser networks to maximise user throughput subject to the power and resource sharing constraints. By exploiting the cumulative distribution function-based scheduling method, the authors first characterise the optimal power allocation subject to both long-term and short-term power constraints. Instead of calculating the transmit power in an iterative and central manner, users can independently decide their instantaneous transmit power in the proposed scheme, which facilitates the algorithm implementation for each user in uplink networks. The closed-form throughput of the proposed scheme is also derived, which can provide an efficient way to estimate and evaluate user performance. Numerical results reveal that compared with several benchmark schemes, the proposed scheme improves throughput performance significantly.