Flexible Subcarrier Allocation for Interleaved Frequency Division Multiple Access

Interleaved Frequency Division Multiple Access (IFDMA) and Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) belong to a class of signal modulation and multiple-access techniques in which information of multiple users are multiplexed and carried on subcarriers within a shared spectrum. Compared with OFDMA, IFDMA has lower Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). However, IFDMA poses two rigid constraints on subcarrier allocation: 1) the subcarriers occupied by a user must be evenly-spaced among the available subcarriers. 2) the number of subcarriers used by a user must be a divisor of the total number of subcarriers. Unless these constraints can be overcome, IFDMA may remain impractical despite its excellent PAPR. This paper investigates how to overcome these constraints to allow flexible and fine-grained subcarrier allocation in IFDMA. Specifically, we put forth i) a bit-reversal subcarrier allocation scheme whereby the problem of allocating evenly-spaced subcarriers is transformed to a more intuitive problem of filling contiguous bins; ii) a multi-stream IFDMA scheme whereby a user can have an arbitrary number of subcarriers. For the synchronous scenario in which user requests arrive in a synchronous manner, we show that IFDMA can achieve the same level of flexibility and granularity as OFDMA in subcarrier allocation. For the asynchronous scenario in which user requests arrive and depart asynchronously, we show that the blocking probability of IFDMA is only slightly worse than that of OFDMA: specifically, the gap between the blocking probabilities of IFDMA and OFDMA is only 2.56% at a moderate offered load.