Scheduling and resource allocation in OFDM and FBMC systems: An interactive approach and performance comparison

In modern wireless communication systems, scheduling and resource allocation are two closely related tasks of the medium access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) layers respectively. In this paper, we present a separate yet interactive design of the two functional modules, where the scheduler prioritizes data packets from different service flows according to their traffic characteristics and feedback from the resource allocator, while the resource allocator performs quality of service (QoS) constrained transmit power minimization given lists of prioritized packets from the scheduler. The simulation results of applying the model to both cyclic prefix based OFDM (CP-OFDM) and the filter bank based multicarrier (FBMC) systems demonstrate the superior performance of the latter.