A Hierarchical Resource Allocation for OFDMA Distributed Wireless Communication Systems

In this paper, a fair and simple resource allocation scheme is proposed for orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access distributed wireless communication systems (OFDMA-DWCS). Instead of finding global optimal solution, we hierarchically decouple the subcarrier and power allocation problem into two subproblems. A distributed scheduling is employed on two levels: access-point-level (AP-level) and user-level. In AP-level scheduling, the subcarriers are roughly allocated by the central unit (CU) to different APs. In user-level scheduling, a further subcarrier and power allocation is performed by each AP for its underlying users. We adopt Nash bargain solution fairness criterion in our scheme, which ensures a good tradeoff between fairness and efficiency on both the AP-level and the user-level. Simulation results demonstrate that the distributed scheme can achieve comparable overall system rate to that of centralized algorithms with much reduced complexity.