A low-complexity subcarrier-power allocation scheme for frequency-division multiple-access systems

This letter aims to design a low-complexity subcarrier-power allocation scheme to improve the communication reliability of various types of frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA) systems. Both uplink and downlink are considered. Specifically, a low-complexity worst subcarrier avoiding (WSA) subcarrier-allocation scheme is proposed, in order to avoid assigning users the subcarriers experiencing severe fading. After the subcarrier-allocation, channel-inversion assisted power-allocation is employed to assign the subcarriers the corresponding power. Our studies and simulation results show that the achievable error performance of the FDMA systems employing the proposed subcarrier-power allocation algorithm is independent of the multiplexing method. The proposed algorithm outperforms the existing subcarrier-power allocation algorithms that have a similar complexity as the proposed one.