Iterative power and subcarrier allocation for maximizing WSMR in cellular OFDMA systems

We consider the resource allocation (RA) problem of maximizing the weighted sum of the minimal user rates (WSMR) of coordinated cells subject to a total power constraint at each base station (BS) in the downlink of a cellular orthogonal frequency division multi-access (OFDMA) system. In particular, the solution of this problem corresponds to a RA that guarantees similar rates to users in each cell. We propose a coordinate ascent (CA) based algorithm which alternatively updates the power allocation by solving a successive set of convex optimization problems with a duality-based numerical algorithm, and the subcarrier allocation by solving a mixed integer linear program for each cell. The effectiveness of the algorithm is illustrated by numerical experiments.