Dynamic User Grouping and Joint Resource Allocation With Multi-Cell Cooperation for Uplink Virtual MIMO Systems

This paper proposes a novel joint resource allocation algorithm combining dynamic user grouping, multi-cell cooperation, and resource block (RB) allocation for single carrier-frequency division multiple access uplink in multi-cell virtual MIMO systems. We first develop the dynamic multi-cell user grouping criteria using minimum mean square error equalization and adaptive modulation with bit error rate (BER) constraint. Then, we formulate and solve a new throughput maximization problem whose resource allocation includes cell selection, dynamic user grouping, and RB pattern assignment. Furthermore, to reduce the computational complexity significantly, especially in the case of large numbers of users and RBs, we present an efficient iterative Hungarian algorithm based on user and resource partitions to solve the problem by decomposing the large scale problem into a series of small scale sub-problems, which can obtain close-to-optimal solution with much lower complexity. The simulation results show that our proposed joint resource allocation algorithm with dynamic multi-cell user grouping scheme achieves better system throughput with BER guarantee than fixed user grouping algorithm and other proposed schemes in the literature.