Joint Prioritized Scheduling and Resource Allocation for OFDMA-Based Wireless Networks

In this paper, we study the joint prioritized link scheduling and resource allocation for OFDMA-based wireless networks, which serve two classes of wireless links, namely, non-prioritized (low-priority) and prioritized (high-priority) links. Our design aims to maximize the number of scheduled non-prioritized links and their sum rate, while guaranteeing the minimum required rates of all active prioritized and non-prioritized links. We present the problem formulation as a single-stage optimization problem, which simultaneously maximizes the number of scheduled non-prioritized links and their sum rate. We propose a monotonic-based optimal approaching (MBOA) algorithm to solve this problem by employing the monotonic global optimization technique and an efficient rounding procedure. We prove that the MBOA algorithm can schedule the maximum number of non-prioritized links with slight and controllable degradation in the minimum required rates of non-prioritized links. For low-complexity design, we propose an iterative convex approximation algorithm, which sequentially performs power allocation and link removal in each iteration. We then describe how the proposed algorithms can be implemented in the standardized LTE-based cellular system. Finally, we conduct numerical studies for device-to-device communications underlaid cellular networks under perfect or imperfect channel state information (CSI). Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can be applied to the imperfect CSI scenario with slight degradation in the network performance. Moreover, in the perfect CSI scenario, the proposed algorithms significantly outperform the conventional algorithms both in the number of scheduled non-prioritized links and their sum rate.