On Coding of Scheduling Information in OFDM

Control signaling strategies for scheduling information in cellular OFDM systems are studied. A single-cell multiuser system model is formulated that provides system capacity estimates accounting for the signaling overhead. Different scheduling granularities are considered, including the one used in the specifications for the 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE). A greedy scheduling method is assumed, where each resource is assigned to the user for which it can support the highest number of bits. The simulation results indicate that the cost of control signaling does not outweigh the scheduling gain, when compared with a simple round-robin scheme that does not need signaling of scheduling information. Furthermore, in the studied scenario, joint coding and signaling of scheduling information over all selected users is found to be superior to separate coding and signaling for each user. The results also indicate that the scheduling granularity used for LTE provides better performance than the full granularity.