A Novel Subcarrier Allocation Algorithm for Multiuser

OFDM System With Fairness: Users Perspective

Sanam Sadr, Alagan Anpalagan and Kaamran Raahemifar
WINCORE Laboratory
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
AbstractIn wireless multiuser OFDM systems, dynamic
resource allocation has been shown to improve the performance
by exploiting the multiuser diversity. In this paper we propose a
subcarrier allocation algorithm to increase the total data rate for
the downlink of a variable bit rate multiuser OFDM system with
proportional rate constraints subject to bit error rate and total
transmit power. We assume that the channel is quasi-static where
the channel status does not vary within each transmission block
and the base station has perfect knowledge of subchannel gains.
The proposed algorithm is based on prioritizing the critical (most
sensitive) user in the system and the variance of the subchannel
gains for each user is used to dene the sensitivity of the user
to the subcarrier allocation. Simulation results show that this
algorithm achieves higher capacity with acceptable proportional
fairness compared to the previous suboptimal solutions proposed
by Rhee et al. in [9] and Shen et al. in [12].
I. INTRODUCTION
The future wireless communication systems should support
large number of users each with a different quality of service
(QoS) requirement. The challenges to ensure the fulllment
of these requirements arise form the limited availability of
frequency spectrum and the nature of the wireless channel.
In broadband applications, the wireless channel encounters
frequency selective-multipath fading which means that the
signal (considered as an electromagnetic wave) after being
transmitted is scattered, diffracted and reected and reaches
the antenna as an incoherent superposition of many signals
each as a poorly synchronized echo component of the desired
signal [1]. This phenomenon leads to severe intersymbol
interference (ISI) both in time and frequency. To solve this
issue, intelligent radio resource management algorithms in
both the physical and the media access control (MAC) layers
are essential with the ability to combat ISI.
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is one
of the promising solutions to provide a high performance
physical layer based on the concept of multicarrier trans-
mission. The idea is to divide the broadband channel into
N narrowband subchannels each with a bandwidth less than
the coherence bandwidth of the channel. The high rate data
stream is then split into N substreams of lower rate data which
are modulated into N M-level quadrature amplitude (QAM)
symbols and transmitted simultaneously on N orthogonal
subcarriers. Each of these subcarriers experiences different
fades for different users in a frequency selective fading
channel. While in a single user system, the user can use all N
subcarriers, in a multiuser OFDM system there is a need for a
multiple access scheme to allocate the subcarriers to the users.
In static subcarreir allocation schemes such as TDMA (Time
Division Multiple Access) and FDMA (Frequency Division
Multiple Access), each user is assigned predetermined time
slots or frequency bands respectively regardless of channel
responses. In other words, in non-adaptive xed resource allo-
cation schemes an independent dimension is allocated to each
user without considering the channel status. In such systems,
the optimization problem reduces to only power allocation or
bit loading on the subcarriers, the best scenario of which is
applying water-lling [2] with adaptive modulation [3]. On the
other hand, since the fading parameters for different users are
mutually independent, the probability that a subcarrier is in
deep fade for all the users is very low [4]. This is the principle
of dynamic OFDM systems in which subcarrier allocation
itself plays a very signicant role in maximizing the total
throughput by using multiuser diversity.
The problem of resource allocation in a multiuser OFDM
system with N subcarriers and K users is to determine
the elements of two matrixes: C = [c
k,n
]
KN
specifying
which subcarrier should be assigned to which user and P =
[p
k,n
]
KN
specifying how much power should be allocated to
each subcarrier. To determine the elements of the rst matrix it
is assumed that subcarriers are not shared by different users
based on the theorem proved in [5] that the data rate of a
multiuser OFDM system is maximized when each subcarrier
is assigned to only one user that has the best channel gain for
that subcarrier.
Many dynamic resource allocation algorithms and opti-
mization techniques have been proposed in the literature for
the downlink of a multiuser OFDM system. The ultimate goal
of all is to reach the highest throughput with the minimum
transmit power either with the users data rates as the con-
straint and the total transmit power as the objective (power
adaptive) [4], or with the constraint on the power and the
total throughput of the system as the objective (rate adaptive)
[5] and [6]. There is also a third category of rate adaptive
dynamic resource allocation algorithms [9]-[12], which are
developed to support variable bit rate services with fairness
in the system. In this category while the objective is to
maximize the total throughput within the power budget, the
goal is to maintain the proportionality between the users rates
according to proportional constraints rather than reaching a
specic requested data rate.
In this paper, we focus on increasing the total throughput
with fairness and propose a novel subcarrier allocation algo-
rithm which considers a new parameter in order to nd the
best user for each subcarrier. In simulations, the performance
of the algorithm is compared to the existing algorithms
in terms of total data rate and fairness. It is shown that
the proposed algorithm achieves higher total data rate with
acceptable rate proportionality.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section
II, the optimization problem in a multiuser OFDM system
with proportional rate constraints is formulated followed by
the existing suboptimal solutions. The proposed algorithm is
1-4244-0264-6/07/$25.00 2007 Crown Copyright
1772
explained in Section III. Fairness is discussed in Section IV.
Simulation results are presented in Section V. The paper is
concluded in Section VI.
II. OPTIMIZATION PROBLEM WITH PROPORTIONAL RATE
CONSTRAINTS
It is assumed that there are K users and N subcarriers in
the system. The wireless channel is modelled as frequency
selective Rayleigh fading. Additive White Gaussian Noise
(AWGN) is present with single-sided noise power spectral
density (PSD) level of N
0
for all subcarriers and all users.
The bandwidth of each subcarrier is much smaller than the
coherence bandwidth of the channel and the channel status
does not change within a block of transmission. In such a
system, the data rate for the kth user R
k
is given by:
R
k
=
B
N
N

n=1
c
k,n
log
2
(1 +
k,n
), (1)
where B is the total bandwidth, c
k,n
is the subcarrier assign-
ment index indicating whether the kth user occupies the nth
subcarrier or not,
B
N
=
1
T
and T is the OFDM symbol duration.

k,n
is the signal to noise ratio of the nth subcarrier for the
kth user and is given by:

k,n
=
p
k,n
|H
k,n
|
2

2
, (2)
where p
k,n
is the power allocated to the kth user in the nth
subcarrier, H
k,n
is the channel gain of user k in subcarrier
n and
2
= N
0
B
N
is the noise power on each subcarrier. In
order to meet the required BER constraint, the effective SNR
should be adjusted accordingly. In [4] the required receive
power for supporting r
k,n
bits per symbol in the case of M-
level QAM with square signal constellations at a given BER
P
e
is given by:
f(r
k,n
) =
N
0
3

Q
1

P
e
4

2
(2
r
k,n
1), (3)
where
Q(x) =
1

x
e
t
2
/2
dt.
However, to formulate the resource allocation problem, the
approximate expression is used for BER. In [7] the BER
of a square MQAM with Gray bit mapping in AWGN as
a function of received SNR
k,n
and number of bits r
k,n
has
been approximated tight to within 1dB for r
k,n
2 and BER
10
3
as:
BER
MQAM
(
k,n
) 0.2 exp

1.6
k,n
2
r
k,n
1

. (4)
Solving for r
k,n
we have:
r
k,n
= log
2

1 +

k,n

, (5)
where = ln(5BER)/1.6.
The optimization problem with proportional rate constraints
is then formulated as:
max
c
k,n
,p
k,n
K

k=1
N

n=1
c
k,n
log
2
(1 +

k,n

), (6)
C1 : c
k,n
{0, 1} , k, n
C2 :

K
k=1
c
k,n
= 1, n
Subject to: C3 : p
k,n
0 , k, n
C4 :

K
k=1

N
n=1
c
k,n
p
k,n
P
total
C5 : R
1
: R
2
: ... : R
K
=
1
:
2
: ... :
K
The rst two constraints are on subcarrier allocation.
The assignment index c
k,n
= 1, only if subcarrier n is
allocated to user k; otherwise it is zero. The next two
constraints are on power allocation where P
total
is the total
transmit power of the system. {
1
,
2
, ...,
K
} is the set
of predetermined proportional constraints where
k
is a
positive real number with
min
= 1 for the user with the
least required proportional rate.
The optimal solution includes solving a mixed binary in-
teger programming problem with nonlinear constraints which
may not be practical in real time applications due to high
computational complexity. As a result, suboptimal algorithms
have been developed which differ mostly in: 1) the way
they have split the procedure into different steps to make
the problem tractable and 2) their simplifying assumptions
to reduce the complexity of the allocation process. The
performance of each algorithm highly depends on the validity
of these simplifying assumptions. It was shown in [8] that in a
single user water-lling solution, the total data rate of a zero-
margin system is close to capacity even with at transmit
power spectral density (PSD) as long as the energy is poured
only into subchannels with good channel gains. As a result,
based on this assumption that each subchannel is assigned to
the user whose channel gain is good for it, a at transmit
PSD was used in [9] indicating that the power allocated to
each subcarrier is constant and equal to
P
total
N
. Therefore,
the resource allocation reduces to only subcarrier allocation.
In the process of subcarrier allocation two goals take place
alternatively: One is to maintain fairness among the users
by giving priority to the user with the least achieved rate to
choose the next subcarrier; the other is to increase the total
data rate by allocating the best available subcarrier to that
user. The authors in [10] modied the proposed algorithm in
[9] by redistributing the power among each users assigned
subcarriers with water-lling policy and updating the users
data rates with the new power allocation before assigning the
next subcarrier. Authors in [11] and [12] adopted a two step
approach: in the rst step, the algorithm outlined in [9] is
employed for subcarrier allocation. In the second step, the
power is reallocated between the users and then among the
subcarriers through the use of water-lling to enforce the
rate proportionality among the users. In [13] equal number
of subcarriers are assigned to each user to maintain fairness
and the greedy algorithm is applied for bit loading. The results
shown in [5] and [9] indicate that a at transmit PSD would
hardly reduce the total data rate of a multiuser OFDM system
provided that the proper subcarrier allocation is applied. In
this paper, an equal power allocation is assumed and the focus
is to determine the subcarrier allocation described next.
III. THE PROPOSED ALGORITHM
We propose to allocate the subcarriers to the users based
on the sensitivity of the users to the subcarrier allocation.
Considering subcarriers i and j for the kth user, the change
in the data rate of the kth user due to assigning subcarrier i
1773
instead of subcarrier j, R
k
(i, j) is given by:
R
k
(i, j) = R
k
(i) R
k
(j)
=
B
N

log
2
(1 +

k,i

) log
2
(1 +

k,j

=
B
N
log
2

1+
p
k,i|
H
k,i|
2

1+
p
k,j|
H
k,j|
2

,
(7)
where R
k
(i) and R
k
(j) are the kth users achieved data rates
on subcarriers i and j respectively. Without loss of generality,
we assume that H
k,i
> H
k,j
. The maximum change in the
achieved rate of the kth user is then given by:
R
k,max
=
B
N
log
2

1 +
p(|H
k,mean
|
2
+s)

1 +
p(|H
k,mean
|
2
s)

, (8)
where |H
k,mean
|
2
is the average channel power gain for the
kth user, s is the kth users channel gain standard deviation
from the mean and a at transmit power p is assumed on
all the subcarriers. Now if s is zero then R
k
(i, j) = 0
implying that it results in no difference in the kth users data
rate whether it chooses subcarrier i or subcarrier j. However,
as s increases, so does R
k
(i, j) increasing the sensitivity of
the users data rate to the subcarrier allocation.
In other words, from the users point of view if the variance
of the subchannel gains for the kth user is low, it matters
less which subchannel is allocated to the kth user since the
subchannels experience almost the same amount of fade for
this user. On the other hand, the user with high variance
of subchannel gains is more sensitive to the subchannel
allocation. Therefore, in the proposed algorithm, priority is
given to the critical (most sensitive) user to choose its best
subcarrier. However, if a user has a large variance and this
characteristic continues to hold, then this user ends up getting
all the subchannels while the others get nothing. To solve this
problem, it is assumed that the proportion of the subcarriers
assigned to each user is approximately the same as the rate
constraints (as done in [11]). To satisfy this assumption we
should have:
N
1
: N
2
: ... : N
K
=
1
:
2
: ... :
K
(9)
where N
k
is the number of subcarriers assigned to the kth
user. This is accomplished by:
N
k
=

k
N

K
k=1

. (10)
After each user gets its initial proportion, the rest of the
subchannels are assigned to the users either to increase the
total data rate or to increase fairness.
The proposed algorithm is described below:

Initialization
c
k,n
= 0, k, n
R
k
= 0, k
A = {1, 2, ..., N},
A

= ,
N

=

K
k=1
N
k
U = {1, 2, ..., K}.
Subcarrier Allocation
for m = 1 to N

V
k
= Var(H
k,n
), n A
k = arg max V
k
, (if N
k
> 0)
n = arg max
nA
H
k,n
,
c
k,n
= 1, N
k
= N
k
1,
A = A{n} and A

= A

{n},
R
k
= R
k
+
B
N
log
2
(1 +

k,n

).
while A =
Scenario 1:
k = arg min(R
k
/
k
),
n = arg max
nA
H
k,n
,
c
k,n
= 1, N
k
= N
k
+ 1,
A = A{n} and A

= A

{n},
R
k
= R
k
+
B
N
log
2
(1 +

k,n

).
Scenario 2:
for n = 1 to (N N

)
k = arg max
kU
H
k,n
,
c
k,n
= 1, N
k
= N
k
+ 1,
R
k
= R
k
+
B
N
log
2
(1 +

k,n

),
U = U {k}.
end

In the rst step, all the variables are initialized. A and

A

are the sets of available (unallocated) and allocated

subcarriers respectively. N

is the sum of minimum number

of subcarriers initially required by the users derived from
equation (10), and U is the set of all users.
In the second step, the variance of the subchannel gains
for each user V
k
, is calculated (and updated at each iteration)
taking into account only those subcarriers that have not yet
been assigned. The critical user with the largest variance is
then given priority to choose the best subcarrier. Once user k
gets the allotment of N
k
subcarriers, that user can no longer
be assigned more subcarriers.
The remaining subchannels are allocated in the nal step.
We can have different scenarios based on the exibility in
the objective of the algorithm and the number of unallocated
subchannels.
Scenario 1: If adherence to the proportionality con-
straints needs be strictly enforced, then the user with
the least achieved proportional data rate should be given
priority to choose the best available subcarrier.
Scenario 2: If a rough proportionality is acceptable, each
user gets at most one assigned subcarrier. In order to
further increase the total rate, the user with the largest
channel gain chooses the rst share.
For both scenarios, equal power allocation among the subcar-
riers is assumed.
IV. FAIRNESS
Fairness is one of the important issues in a system which
indicates how equally the resources are distributed among the
users and could be dened in terms of different parameters of
the system. It could be in terms of bandwidth where each user
is assigned an equal number of subcarriers [13], or it could be
in terms of power where each user is allocated equal portion
of the power from the budget. It could also be in terms of
data rate where the objective is to ensure rate proportionality
among the users [14] which is called constrained-fairness.
The problem and the suboptimal solution proposed in [9] is
a special case of constrained-fairness with equal proportional
constraints. The fairness index is dened as [14]:
1774
F =

K
k=1

2
K

K
k=1

2
k
, (11)
with the maximum value of 1 to be the greatest fairness case
in which all users would achieve the same data rate. Based on
the above equation, we dene a new parameter F
p
to examine
the performance of the system to ensure proportional fairness
which is given by:
F
p
=

K
k=1
R
k

2
K

K
k=1
(
R
k

k
)
2
, (12)
where R
k
and
k
are the achieved data rate and the propor-
tional rate constraint for the kth user respectively. F
p
is a real
number in the interval (0, 1] with the maximum value of 1 for
the case that the achieved rate proportions among the users
are the same as the predetermined set {
k
}
K
k=1
.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, the performance of the proposed algorithm
is compared with the algorithms in [9] and [12].
A. Simulation Parameters
The channel is modelled as frequency selective consisting
of six independent Rayleigh fading multipaths with expo-
nential power prole. The total power and the bandwidth
of the system are 1W and 1MHz respectively. There are 64
subcarriers in the system and perfect knowledge of subchannel
gains are assumed. The modulation used is M-level QAM.
A total of 1000 different channel realizations were used and
the results were averaged. The performance of the proposed
subcarrier allocation is compared with the existing algorithms
in two parts: In the rst part, the comparison is over the
achieved total data rate as well as fairness with different
rate proportionality among the users. In the second part,
the comparison is done while the rate constraints are set to
be equal. We refer to the proposed subcarrier allocation as
Critical User Method (CUM). The comparison is made with
the algorithm proposed in [9] with at PSD and the method
proposed in [12] with adaptive power allocation.
B. Non-equal Proportional Constraints
Fig. 1 shows the comparison of the spectral efciency
between CUM and the method proposed in [12] for average
SNR ranging from 10-40dB. K = 16 and the proportional
constraints are randomly chosen from the set {1, 2, 4} for each
channel realization. The average SNR is dened as

Ptot
N0B

.
It is seen that the proposed algorithm has achieved slightly
higher total data rate compared to method in [12]. This ad-
vantage is due to relaxation of the proportionality constraints
which were enforced in [12] through the reallocation of the
power among the users and subcarriers.
The comparison of the two algorithms in terms of rate
proportionality is shown in Fig. 2. The leftmost bars are
the normalized constraints {
k
}
K
k=1
, where
k
=

k

K
k=1

k
.
The same normalization is used for achieved data rates. It is
shown that method in [12] has better performance since it ap-
plies adaptive power allocation to enforce the proportionality
among the users. The performance of our proposed algorithm
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
S
p
e
c
t
r
a
l

E
f
f
i
c
i
e
n
c
y

(
b
i
t
s
/
s
/
H
z
)
SNR (dB)
Proposed
Shen et al. [12]
Fig. 1. Spectral efciency versus average SNR for N = 64 subcarriers and
K = 16 users. BER = 10
3
. The capacity achieved by CUM is higher than
method in [12].
however, is close to the required proportional constraints with
no power reallocation. To better examine the proportional
fairness of these algorithms for different number of users,
their performance is shown in Fig. 3 in terms of F
p
using
equation (12). It is shown that 0.999 < F
p
< 1 for the
proposed algorithm where as F
p
= 1 for method in [12].
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
0
0.01
0.02
0.03
0.04
0.05
0.06
0.07
0.08
0.09
0.1
User Number (k)
N
o
r
m
a
l
i
z
e
d

R
a
t
e

P
r
o
p
o
r
t
i
o
n
s
Normalized constraints
Proposed
Shen et al. [12]
Fig. 2. Normalized capacity ratios per user for SNR = 30dB, K = 16 and
BER=10
3
.
C. Equal Proportional Constraints
In this part,
k
= 1 k, enforcing all the users to get the
same amount of data rate. Fig. 4 shows the comparison of the
minimum users capacity between CUM and the methods
proposed in [9] and [12] for K = 2 16 users. Both CUM
and the method in [9] apply the power mask of p
n
=
Ptot
N
on
the subcarriers whereas the algorithm in [12] applies a second
step of adaptive power allocation. Users average data rate for
different number of users is also shown in Fig. 5. It is seen
that both minimum users data rate and users average data
rate in the proposed algorithm are higher than the other two
methods for different number of users which shows higher
1775
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
0.996
0.997
0.998
0.999
1
1.001
1.002
1.003
1.004
1.005
F
a
i
r
n
e
s
s
Number of Users (K)
Proposed
Shen et al. [12]
Fig. 3. Fairness versus number of users K = 2 16, for SNR = 30dB
and N = 64.
achieved overall capacity by increasing each users achieved
data rate. Also, the performance of the algorithm proposed
in [9] is very close to the algorithm in [12] for equal rate
proportions as both apply the same subcarrier allocation.
2 4 6 8 10 12
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
M
i
n
i
m
u
m

U
s
e
r

s

C
a
p
a
c
i
t
y

(
b
i
t
s
/
s
/
H
z
)
Number of Users (K)
Proposed
Shen et al. [12]
Rhee et al. [9]
Fig. 4. Minimum users capacity versus number of users for N = 64
subcarriers and BER = 10
3
.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the problem of resource allocation for a
variable bit rate multiuser system with proportional rate
constraints was discussed. While adaptive power allocation
can be applied to enforce the rate proportionality among
the users, the subcarrier allocation plays a signicant role in
the overall performance. In this paper we proposed a novel
subcarrier allocation algorithm which is based on prioritizing
the critical users in the system. Although the system capacity
is maximized when each subchannel is allocated to the user
with the best suchannel gain on it, when considering the
problem combined with fairness, the systems performance
could be improved if the second best subchannel is allocated
to the corresponding user with low subchannel gain variance.
The simulation results have shown improvement in terms of
2 4 6 8 10 12
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
U
s
e
r

s

A
v
e
r
a
g
e

C
a
p
a
c
i
t
y

(
b
i
t
s
/
s
/
H
z
)
Number of Users (K)
Proposed
Shen et al. [12]
Rhee et al. [9]
Fig. 5. Users average capacity versus number of users. There are N = 64
subcarriers and BER = 10
3
.
total data rate with acceptable rate proportionality among
the users compared to the method proposed in [9] and the
one with adaptive power allocation proposed in [12]. In the
proposed algorithm, the power was assumed constant and
equal on all of the subcarriers to reduce the complexity.
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