Adaptive channel and power allocation of downlink multi-user MC-CDMA systems

The Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is becoming a very attractive multiple access technique for high-rate data transmission in the future wireless communication systems. This paper is focused on the joint channel and power allocation in the downlink transmission of multi-user MC-CDMA systems and considers the throughput maximization problem as a mixed integer optimization problem. For simple analysis, the problem is divided into two less complex sub-problems: power allocation and channel allocation, which can be solved by a suboptimal Adaptive Power Allocation (APA) algorithm and an optimal Adaptive Channel Allocation (ACA) algorithm, respectively. By combining APA and ACA algorithms, an adaptive channel and power allocation scheme is proposed. The numerical results show that the proposed APA algorithm is more suitable for MC-CDMA systems than the conventional equal power allocation algorithm, and the proposed channel and power allocation scheme can significantly improve the system throughput performance.