Analysis of Channel-Aware Multi-User Resource Allocators for Correlated Rayleigh Fading

When employing wireless connectivity in industrial applications, reliability is indispensable. However, due to the real-time requirements of said scenarios, time diversity is not feasible. Instead, frequency diversity has to be utilized by transmitting on frequencies with different fading characteristics. But as increasing bandwidth requirements for the individual user does not scale well for many users in the presence of a limited system bandwidth, the available resources have to be allocated efficiently. In this work, we compare multi-user resource allocation algorithms utilizing each user’s channel state information. The performance of the allocators is evaluated with regard to the achievable outage rate for different scenarios and different sensitivity analyses are performed. We also evaluate the algorithmic complexity of the allocators, both empirically and analytically. For evaluation, we employ analytical, spectrally correlated Rayleigh fading in order to emulate different environments. For a number of existing allocators, we propose modifications to improve the performance in regard to reliability and algorithmic complexity. The simulation results show, that the utilized allocators can be employed for a multitude of scenarios as they are suited for a large variety of application areas. Additionally, our results show that the allocation complexity of existing allocators can be reduced by up to a factor of 10 in the investigated scenario with a modified approach without sacrificing reliability.