Joint user pairing and resource allocation for virtual MIMO in uplink SC-FDMA system

In this paper, we study the joint user pairing and resource allocation problem for uplink single carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) system with virtual multiple-input multiple-output (V-MIMO) implemented. Different from existing relevant researches, we consider a universal solution based on profit function for this problem instead of studying a particular scheduling policy, and then we explain that it is a MAX SNP-hard problem with high complexity. After that, we will propose a low-complexity heuristic algorithm called First User First (FuF), which is based on the idea of allocating resource to one user first. Moreover, in order to get a more accurate theoretical approximation to this problem, we will propose a constant factor approximation algorithm with polynomial-time complexity using local ratio technique. The simulation results of our algorithms show that the B-LRT algorithm has robust performance compared with other popular algorithms, while the FuF algorithm has lowest computation complexity at the expense of a little performance loss.