Fundamental analysis on throughput characteristics of orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) in multipath propagation environments

This paper describes an image of radio access method: OFDMA, which is based on OFDM modulation realizing reliable data transmission under frequency selective fading, and analyzes its transmission characteristics. In this method, the whole frequency band is shared with all users and a given number of subcarriers with higher order in CNR are selected by each user. Then the adaptive modulation which can enhance the throughput performance without loosing data transmission quality, is adopted for each subband. Assuming that our proposed scheme works ideally, we develop the theoretical model that can estimate the transmission characteristics (the throughput characteristic). Finally, we carry out computer simulation to verify the accuracy of the theoretical model.