Power allocation for OFDM using adaptive beamforming over wireless networks

The performance of a multiuser wireless network using orthogonal frequency-division modulation (OFDM), combined with power control and adaptive beamforming for uplink transmission is presented here. A network-wide adaptive power control algorithm is used to achieve the desired signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio at each OFDM subcarrier and increase the power efficiency of the network. As a result, we can achieve a better overall error probability for a fixed total transmit power. With the assumption of fixed-modulation for all subcarriers, transmit powers and beamforming weight vectors at each subcarrier are updated jointly, using an iterative algorithm that converges to the optimal solution for the entire network. Unlike most of the loading algorithms, this approach considers fixed bit allocation and optimizes the power allocation and reduces the interference for the entire network, rather than a single transmitter. We also propose joint time-domain beamforming and power control to reduce the complexity resulting from the number of beamformers and fast Fourier transformed blocks. The proposed algorithm is also extended to COFDM and we show that it improves the performance of those systems.