A Fairness-based and Adaptive User Grouping and Subcarrier Allocation Algorithm for Grouped MC-CDMA Systems

In this paper, we propose a user grouping and subcarrier allocation algorithm for grouped MC-CDMA systems. Given the fading conditions of the subcarriers of all the users, we first adaptively divide the users into groups according to their overall fading effect and then perform subcarrier allocation to each group. This scheme aims at maximizing total system throughput while guaranteeing bandwidth-fairness among groups. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of time stability, total data rate, spectral efficiency and average user efficiency. We also compare the performance of our algorithm with that of random policy and the optimal scheme. The results show that our scheme outperforms the random policy and has almost the same performance as the optimal one while having considerably low complexity.