Energy efficient and quality of service aware resource block allocation in OFDMA systems

This study investigates energy efficient allocation of radio resource blocks in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems while considering the status of the users´ data buffers to reduce packet dropping rate by the downlink scheduler. The proposed scheme exploits the fluctuations of traffic load to efficiently schedule users´ data packets by reducing the overall energy consumption of the system whenever the status of data buffers permits. From information theory point of view, the proposed scheme exploits the fundamental trade-off between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency to perform scheduling. First, the problem is formulated as an optimisation problem and then a novel solution, based on dynamic programming, is applied. By comparing the analytical solution with the ones obtained by exhaustive search, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is close to the optimal solution, with low computational complexity. In addition, comprehensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the suggested algorithm. Both analytical and simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm compared with the well-known benchmark schemes in terms of energy efficiency and packet dropping rate.