Radio resource allocation in OFDMA multi-cell networks

TL;DR

This paper addresses radio resource allocation in OFDMA multi-cell networks, proposing heuristic algorithms to minimize power while ensuring user data rates, demonstrating effectiveness through computational experiments.

Contribution

Introduces heuristic algorithms based on network flow models for power-efficient resource allocation in multi-cell OFDMA networks, with proven effectiveness and computational efficiency.

Findings

Heuristic algorithms achieve near-optimal solutions.

Proposed methods outperform commercial solvers in speed and quality.

NP-hardness of the problem is established.

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of allocating users to radio resources (i.e., subcarriers) in the downlink of an OFDMA cellular network is addressed. We consider a multi-cellular environment with a realistic interference model and a margin adaptive approach, i.e., we aim at minimizing total transmission power while maintaining a certain given rate for each user. The computational complexity issues of the resulting model is discussed and proving that the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. Heuristic approaches, based on network flow models, that finds optima under suitable conditions, or "reasonably good" solutions in the general case are presented. Computational experiences show that, in a comparison with a commercial state-of-the-art optimization solver, the proposed algorithms are effective in terms of solution quality and CPU times.