Resource Allocation and Control Signaling in the WINNER Flexible MAC Concept

The EU WINNER projects have studied OFDM-based packet data systems beyond 3G that use adaptivity on all time- scales to obtain high flexibility and performance. The adaptive transmission in both downlink and uplink is scheduled and controlled at base stations and relay nodes and requires frequent transmission of control information over the downlink. The use of scheduling, adaptive modulation and coding, with fine granularity in both time and space, could potentially result in unrealistic bandwidth demands for such downlink control signaling. The present paper describes how this problem has been handled within WINNER in two cases: frequency-adaptive transmission, which allows individual link adaptation within time-frequency resource units and non-frequency adaptive transmission, which averages over the channel variations in the frequency domain. An important tool for limiting the associated control information is to broadcast only a small essential set of control data to all user terminals, using a safe but therefore bandwidth-demanding code rate. The remaining control information is multicast to groups of users with different signal to interference and noise ratios (SINRs). The modulation and code rates of these transmissions are adjusted to the SINRs of these groups. The over-all coded data rate of the control transmission can thereby be reduced to acceptable levels.