Radio Resource Allocation in Multiuser Distributed Antenna Systems

The distributed antenna system (DAS) is a promising system to provide high data rate transmissions in wireless communications. So far, most researches in the performance analysis for the DAS have been focused on single-user cases. This paper aims to investigate and present an optimal resource allocation scheme in downlink multiuser DASs. Different from the resource allocation in a conventional cellular system, the resource allocation in the multiuser DAS must consider multiple channel conditions of the transmission links between multiple remote antenna unites (RAUs) and any user, which increases the complexity of the resource allocation. In order to provide insights in the multiuser DAS, the effect of the number of RAUs used to communicate with each user is investigated extensively. In addition to power allocation, subcarrier allocation and bit allocation are studied in the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) DAS. To reduce the complexity of the resource allocation in the downlink multiuser DAS, the chunk allocation technique is adopted by grouping a set of contiguous subcarriers into one chunk and allocating resources chunk by chunk to users and an equivalent channel fading factor per subcarrier for a user is proposed to represent the combined channel gain from multiple RAUs to the user. The numerical results show that by using the proposed resource allocation method, each user only needs to be connected to a few RAUs, depending on the location of the user.