Opportunistic Scheduling in Multiuser OFDM Systems with Clustered Feedback

This paper proposes a random access based feedback protocol for multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems with clustered feedback, where users are assigned to clusters of subcarriers based on the feedback of channel state information to the base station. To reduce feedback requirements, the proposed protocol employs a contention channel with a fixed number of feedback minislots to carry feedback for each cluster. Users send a feedback message with some probability in the appropriate feedback slot if their average channel quality on a cluster is above a threshold. Both arithmetic and geometric averages are used and compared as channel quality measures. The threshold and feedback probability are jointly adjusted to maximize the estimated average sum rate of all users based on two different limited feedback information. Numerical simulations illustrate that it is possible to achieve multiuser diversity gain despite collisions in the feedback channel and with only a few feedback opportunities.