On the Proportional Fairness Scheduling in Wireless OFDM Systems

The IEEE 802.16 standards are based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and multi-user OFDM (also known as OFDMA) for their desirable characteristics and potentials. Although well established, these standards only provide a framework of necessary mechanisms for deployable systems. Majority of the resource allocation issues are left unspecified. The conventional one-dimension scheduling cannot be readily applied in an 802.16 system. In this paper, a proportional fairness scheduling algorithm for 802.16 systems is proposed that utilizes the flexibility of frame division. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to evaluate these new methods in comparison to previously proposed techniques. The results indicate that the proposed methods lead to satisfactory performances, thanks to their improved two-dimensional feature.