Efficient Scheduling for Heterogeneous Services in OFDMA Downlink

We consider optimal allocation of resources to users in a downlink OFDMA system to support heterogeneous applications consisting of both deadline-sensitive (DS) and best-effort (BE) data in a cross-layer manner. Given the user queue-states and long-term channel statistics, the proposed persistent scheduling algorithm allocates the minimum resources to ´just´ meet the deadlines for DS packets (QoS guarantee). The remaining resources are optimally split between the users for their BE data to maximize sum-rate, minimize buffer holding cost or any general utility function. We formulate the resource allocation problem as a single geometric program (GP) that can be solved using standard convex optimization software tools. Simulation results are presented to compare the performance of different objectives for the BE applications in presence of DS traffic.