The potential of dynamic power and sub-carrier assignments in multi-user OFDM-FDMAa cells

OFDM systems are known to overcome the impairment of the wireless channel by splitting the given system bandwidth into parallel sub-carriers, on which data symbols can be transmitted simultaneously. This enables the possibility of enhancing the system's performance by deploying adaptive (dynamic) mechanisms, namely power and modulation adaption and dynamic sub-carrier assignments. In multi-user communication systems (OFDM-FDMA), these mechanisms can be used to achieve a level of system fairness ensuring that each terminal receives at least an environment-specific minimum amount of data per down-link phase. However, it has been doubted by multiple previous investigations that dynamic power adaption provides enough performance gain in order to be applied in such systems, as it increases the computational load significantly. In this study we discuss the performance gain due to the different approaches and show that in specific communication scenarios enabling a dynamic power distribution provides a significant performance increase compared to dynamic schemes without power adaption