BER-driven resource allocation in OFDMA systems

This paper investigates the impact of multiple BER requirements on resource allocation for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) downlink systems. Max-total capacity (MTC) and proportional fairness (PF) problems are considered. With the goal of maximizing either the instantaneous or long-term network capacity, we propose BER-driven resource allocation (BRA) schemes which exploit both channel state information (CSI) and target BER of each traffic flow. Simulations results show that the average spectral efficiency of the BRA-like schemes is superior to that of the conventional schemes which only consider one BER constraint and thus the chosen BER constraint has to be the strictest one out of multiple BER requirements. The performance gap between these schemes increases when the average signal-to-ratio (SNR) increases. Besides that, the average spectral efficiency increases when the target BER ratio of one user to the other users increases. In other words, our proposed methods enhance wireless resource utilization.