Subcarrier opportunistic proportional fair scheduling for OFDMA systems

Resource allocation (RA) for OFDMA has been extensively researched with the objective of maximizing capacity while serving users in a fair manner. However, most of the previous works have focused on achieving these requirements per symbol (instantaneously). On the other hand proportional fair (PF) scheduling which is widely deployed in 3G data networks achieves the system objectives over a certain time, thus adding flexibility and increasing the system throughput. PF scheduling has been modified to work in OFDMA in a few studies, but they have extended the scheme without making use of the additional capacity increase that can be achieved by considering individual relative subcarrier responses. In this paper we propose a simple subcarrier opportunistic proportional fair (SOPF) scheduling scheme specifically suited to OFDMA. It includes a measure that makes the allocation assign the subcarrier to the user who has the best response relative to the average response of that subcarrier with the rest of the users. The result is that our SOPF scheme achieves a capacity-fairness measure above the traditional PF scheme.