Subcarrier assignment for OFDM based wireless networks using multiple base stations

In this paper we advocate the use of multiple base stations for providing wireless link to an OFDM-based terminal and thus obtain macro diversity, in particular site diversity. The wireless link to a terminal is defined through a subset of sub-carriers that is optimized in a greedy manner over the union of base stations. The wireless terminal is unaware of how many and which base stations are providing its allocated set of sub-carrier, which simplifies the terminal design. We give an analytical comparison of our approach to the conventional solutions. The results show that the proposed schemes with multiple base stations can outperform the single base station case, while keeping the complexity of the wireless terminal unchanged. We further evaluate our schemes by considering minimize signalling over the air interface.