Frequency-Time Scheduling Algorithm for OFDMA Systems

Frequency-time scheduling is an essential radio resource management (RRM) function in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) wireless systems. In the literature, there are several OFDMA scheduling algorithms such as the Hungarian and Max-Max algorithm. However, such algorithms do not consider the multiuser diversity into account. In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm that exploits the multiuser diversity in both time and frequency domains. Also, the proposed algorithm utilizes the Proportional Fairness (PF) criterion to achieve faimess among users in the system. In order to support multimedia bursty traffic, our algorithm allows more than one user to share a subband in each time frame. The proposed algorithm iteratively assigns the available subbands to be shared among different users concurrently. We compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with other OFDMA scheduling algorithms in the literature. Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of the throughput with comparable fairness performance.