An Adaptive User Grouping and Subcarrier Allocation Algorithm for Multiuser MC-CDMA Networks

Grouped MC-CDMA is an efficient system with a number of attractive features. In this paper, we treat the multiuser downlink MC-CDMA system and propose a user grouping and subcarrier allocation algorithm. Given the fading conditions of the subcarriers of all the users, we first adaptively divide the users into groups and then perform subcarrier allocation to each group. This scheme aims to maximize the total system throughput while guaranteeing bandwidth-fairness among groups and the rate-fairness among users in the same group. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of stability, spectral efficiency with different number of groups, and BPS (bits per symbol) per user. We also compare the performance of our algorithm with that of random policy. The result shows that our scheme outperforms the random policy