User based resource scheduling for heterogeneous traffic in the downlink of OFDM systems

Besides avoiding inter-symbol interference and leading to high capacity, wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) provide fine granularity for resource allocation since they are capable of dynamically assigning sub-carriers to multiple users and adaptively allocating transmit power. The current dominate layered networking architecture, in which each layer is designed and operated independently, results in inefficient and inflexible resource use in wireless networks due to the nature of the wireless medium, such as time-varying channel fading. Thus, we need an integrated adaptive design across different layers. In this paper, we focus on resource allocation and scheduling in wireless multiuser OFDM networks based on joint physical and medium access control (MAC) layer optimization. An adaptive cross-layer design for the downlink multiuser OFDM systems, to maximize the weighted sum capacity of all users, where each user has multiple heterogeneous traffic queues simultaneously is proposed. A packet dependent (PD) scheduling scheme is employed at the MAC layer, which determines the packet transmission order by assigning different weights to different packets, and is shown by simulations more efficient than the previous methods where all packets in a queue have the same weight. The weight design in PD scheduling considers the delay, size and quality of service (QoS) priority level of packets. Each user weight employed in resource allocation at the physical (PHY) layer is obtained by summing up the weights of selected packets for the user. We also deeply investigate the various resource scheduling schemes for comparisons.