Power efficient uplink scheduling in SC-FDMA: Bounding global optimality by column generation

We study resource allocation in cellular systems and consider the problem of finding a power efficient scheduling in an uplink single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) system with localized allocation of subcarriers, that is, the subcarriers allocated to a user equipment have to be consecutive in the frequency domain in each time slot. This problem is discrete and nonconvex, thus the use of suboptimal algorithms has been a common practice. We leverage the power of mathematical programming in order to approach global optimality or a tight bounding interval confining global optimum, to arrive at an effective scheme for gauging the performance of suboptimal algorithms. Toward this end, we first provide a straightforward integer linear programming formulation, and then an alternative and less trivial, so-called column-oriented, formulation. The latter is solved by column generation, which is a solution technique for large-scale optimization problems with certain characteristics. The computational evaluation demonstrates that the column generation method produces very highquality subcarrier allocations that either coincide with the global optimum or enable an extremely sharp bounding interval. Hence the approach serves well for the purpose of benchmarking results for large-scale instances of power efficient SC-FDMA scheduling.