Fair resource scheduling algorithm for wireless OFDM systems

The paper discusses the fair resource sharing of adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The multi-channel nature of OFDM and the variance of the wireless channel make it difficult for efficient resource scheduling algorithms to maximize the total system throughput while providing fairness among all users. Thus, a suboptimal fair resource scheduling (FRS) algorithm is proposed. At each step of the algorithm, the user with the least normalized transmit rate is allowed to choose a subcarrier, and the subcarrier with the highest utilization efficiency to that user is selected. Numerical simulation results show that a high throughput is achieved, and that the service fairness index is guaranteed to be within a hard upper bound. Furthermore, it is observed that the throughput is degraded when a user in poor channel condition has a large resource share weight. To mitigate the inefficiency, a subcarrier number limited fair resource scheduling (SNL-FRS) algorithm is proposed.