Multi-user selection diversity for spread-spectrum multi-carrier multiple-access systems

Recently, Multi-User Selection Diversity (MUSDiv) for single-carrier systems has been under extensive study on account of the enhancement it provides to system performance with minimum feedback requirements. However, its application to multichannel systems is considered straightforward and thus, it has not been thoroughly examined. In this paper, the performance of MUSDiv is investigated when applied to the spread-spectrum multi-carrier multiple-access system, where the scheduling has to be performed for all the available channels and self interference must also be considered. Specifically, based on the absolute and normalized Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) scheduling algorithms, two algorithms are presented, modified and optimized, so that they can be applied on a subband instead of a single-channel basis. Moreover, we propose a new scheduling scheme which constitutes a trade-off between the previous schemes, concerning fairness and capacity performance. The new algorithms are related to the symbol Signal-to-Noise-plus-Interference-Ratio (SNIR) instead of SNR and two interference models were devised to this end. Closed-form expressions for the system capacity are extracted for each case, which are compared with simulation results. The research is also extended to the case of non-identical user power profiles among the available subcarriers. The channel state information required to utilize multi-user selection diversity is already necessary for the most common combining schemes, so no more feedback is actually needed.