A Low-Signalling Scheme for Distributed Resource Allocation in Multi-Cellular OFDMA Systems

This paper considers distributed protocol design for joint sub-carrier, transmission scheduling and power management in uplink/downlink multi-cellular OFDMA wireless networks. The optimal solution to this problem is hard to achieve, both in theory and in practice. We propose a fully decentralized resource allocation scheme combining decomposition methods for convex optimization with a strategic non-cooperative game formulation of the power and sub-carrier allocation subproblem. Although the final protocols are suboptimal, they drastically reduce computation time while maintaining the overall system performance close to the optimal, exhibiting strong robustness to multiple access interference. We validate the theoretical framework and quantify the performance with numerical examples.