Low-overhead resource allocation with load balancing in multi-cell OFDMA systems

In this paper, we investigate how to do resource allocation to achieve load balancing at a very low signaling and computation overhead in multi-cell OFDMA wireless systems. We attempt to minimize the maximum value of the QoS violation ratios in each sector. In support of this, we determine the value of frequency reuse factor (FRF) of each sub-carrier dynamically and distribute the sub-carriers with high FRFs differentially among the neighboring sectors according to their load condition. In order to reduce the signaling and computation overhead, we adopt a distributed operation such that resource allocation be managed independently at each "pseudo-cell" composed of the major-interfering sectors respectively belonging to the neighboring cells. Then we present the dynamic resource allocation with limited coordination (DRA-LC) algorithm that can closely approach its near-optimal performance at a substantially reduced overhead by limiting the information sharing among the sectors.