A minimum data-rate guaranteed resource allocation with low signaling overhead in multi-cell OFDMA systems

In this paper, we investigate how to do resource allocation to guarantee a minimum user data rate at low signaling overhead in multi-cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) wireless systems. We devise dynamic resource allocation (DRA) algorithms that can minimize the QoS violation ratio (i.e., the ratio of the number of users who fail to get the requested data rate to the total number of users in the overall network). We assume an OFDMA system that allows dynamic control of frequency reuse factor (FRF) of each sub-carrier. The proposed DRA algorithms determine the FRFs of the sub-carriers and allocate them to the users adaptively based on inter-cell interference and load distribution. In order to reduce the signaling overhead, we adopt a hierarchical resource allocation architecture which divides the resource allocation decision into the inter-cell coordinator (ICC) and the base station (BS) levels. We limit the information available at the ICC only to the load of each cell, that is, the total number of sub-carriers required for supporting the data rate requirement of all the users. We then present the DRA with limited coordination (DRA-LC) algorithm where the ICC performs load-adaptive inter-cell resource allocation with the limited information while the BS performs intra-cell resource allocation with full information about its own cell. For performance comparison, we design a centralized algorithm called DRA with full coordination (DRA-FC). Simulation results reveal that the DRA-LC algorithm can perform close to the DRA-FC algorithm at very low signaling overhead. In addition, it turns out to improve the QoS performance of the cell-boundary users, and achieve a better fairness among neighboring cells under non-uniform load distribution.