Joint Subcarrier and Power Allocation in Channel-Aware Queue-Aware Scheduling for Multiuser OFDM

In an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) downlink scenario, we propose joint subcarrier and power allocation for channel-aware queue-aware scheduling while allowing multiple users to share a single OFDM symbol. Our approach is to combine subcarrier and power allocation by optimizing a user's power allocation immediately after the user has been allocated a subcarrier. Simulation results show that joint subcarrier and power allocation yields a significant performance improvement compared to other existing schemes which perform subcarrier allocation with a fixed (uniform) power allocation assumption. Joint subcarrier and power allocation is also extended to band-wise allocation of subcarriers in order to help reduce signaling overhead in time varying channels. We examine the trade-off between increasing the sub-band size and the corresponding degradation in system performance for different values of the channel multipath delay spread.