Joint subcarrier and power allocation with fairness in uplink OFDMA systems based on ant colony optimization

One of the key problems in uplink orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems is to efficiently and fairly allocate subcarriers and powers. However, most existing work has not sufficiently taken into account fairness when allocating these resources so that subcarriers cannot be fairly allocated among users with different channel conditions. To overcome this shortcoming, we first present an optimization framework with fairness, which aims to fairly allocate subcarriers among different users and to distribute the transmission power of each user over the assigned subcarriers. Here, the fairness is guaranteed by associating each user with a utility function and placing a lower limit on the number of subcarriers assigned. In particular, different from previous work, utility functions are allowed to be nonconcave and nondifferentiable so that our framework can be suitable for resource allocation for real‐time applications. Furthermore, an iterative algorithm based on the ant colony optimization is proposed, according to which subcarriers can be efficiently and fairly allocated among different users. Simulation results verify the convergence of our algorithm. In addition, our algorithm outperforms several other algorithms in terms of the fairness of resource allocation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.