Optimal resource management in wireless multimedia wideband CDMA systems

This paper proposes a scheme of optimal resource management for reverse-link transmissions in multimedia wideband code-division multiple-access (WCDMA) communications. It is to guarantee quality-of-service (QoS) by resource (transmit power and rate) allocation and to achieve high spectral efficiency by base-station assignment. This approach takes the form of a nonlinear-programming large-scale optimization problem: maximizing an abstraction for the profit of a service provider subject to QoS satisfaction. Solutions for both single-cell and multicell systems are investigated. The single-cell solution has the advantage of low complexity and global convergence in comparison with the previous work. Maximum achievable throughput (capacity) of a single cell is mathematically evaluated and used as the benchmark for performance measure of multicell systems. For multicell systems, due to its max-max structure, solving the optimization problem directly entails a high-computational complexity. Instead, the problem is reformulated to a mixed integer nonlinear-programming (MINLP) problem. Then, binary variables indicating base-station assignments are relaxed to their continuous analogs to make a computer solution feasible. Furthermore, approximations can be made to make the resource-management scheme less computationally complex and allow its partial decentralization. The sensitivity of the proposed scheme to path-gain estimation error is studied. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme and the throughput improvement achieved by combining resource allocation with base station assignment.