Utility-Based Resource Allocation in a Multi-Cell OFDMA System with Base Station Cooperation

This paper considers a joint subcarrier and power allocation in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular system with base station (BS) cooperation. The problem is formulated as an average utility maximization subject to the per-antenna power constraint. Existing algorithms to solve similar problem in a single-sell system are shown not so efficient in the cooperative multi-cell system. Therefore, we specially design a method which contains a greedy search algorithm for subcarrier allocation and a Lagrange dual based algorithm for power allocation. Simulation results reveal that the proposed method achieves near-optimal performance and outperforms the counterpart derived originally for a single-cell system by 52% on average, yielding good tradeoff between system efficiency and fairness with proper utility functions.