Optimal and efficient power allocation for OFDM non-coherent cooperative transmission

In this paper, we study the subchannel (SC) power allocation for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) multiple access points (APs) systems with non-coherent cooperative transmission. The objective is to maximize the total capacity under per-AP power constraints. It can be proved that the optimal solution can be obtained by the combination of an optimal SC partition search and the power allocation across SCs for each feasible partition. Existing work exhaustively searched the optimal SC partition and used Lagrange dual method to compute the power allocation across SCs. Since the entire complexity increases exponentially with the number of SCs, the existing method is unsuitable for practical implementation. In this paper, we propose a novel optimal power allocation algorithm for non-coherent cooperative transmission with a much lower complexity. Firstly, a concept of “cut-off SC” is proposed for searching the optimal SC partition. Then, an efficient optimal power allocation algorithm across SCs is proposed for any given cut-off SC. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is optimal with a polynomial complexity, and ends within an acceptable number of iterations.