Performance Analysis of Chunk-Based Resource Allocation in Multi-Cell OFDMA Systems

In the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system, one of the efficient and low complex methods to allocate radio resources among multiple users is chunk-based resource allocation, which groups a number of adjacent subcarriers into a chunk and allocates resources chunk by chunk. In this paper, performance analysis of chunk-based resource allocation is studied in the multi-cell OFDMA environment. Fractional frequency reuse (FFR) is considered in the cellular OFDMA. Basically, FFR divides each cell into central and edge areas where two different values of the frequency reuse factor are assumed. This paper analytically evaluates how spectral efficiency performance is affected by system parameters, including radius ratio of the central area to the whole cell, transmit signal to noise ratio (SNR), number of users, number of subcarriers per chunk, and coherence bandwidth. The numerical results show that there exists an optimal radius ratio to achieve the highest spectral efficiency in the proposed research. The optimal radius ratio is about 0.7, which is almost irrespective of the SNR, number of users, and number of subcarriers per chunk. In other words, the sizes of the central area and the edge area of the whole cell are almost equal when achieving the optimal performance.