Dynamic resource allocation in adaptive wireless OFDMA systems

Modern wireless orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems incorporate dynamic resource allocation (DRA), adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), and power control (PC) to exploit multiuser diversity and achieve higher system throughput. In the literature, only a few proposed algorithms deal with the contiguous DRA problem according to which a contiguous collection of resources can be allocated to each user. This paper formulates this high complexity problem, provides a suitable decision metric and a simple yet efficient solution. The proposed algorithm allocates in each step a contiguous collection of resources to the pending user that leads to the highest estimated correctly received number of bits. Simulation results show that, in this way, considerably improved performance can be achieved in terms of overall system throughput, spectral efficiency, and served traffic. Copyright (c) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.