Efficient subcarrier, power, and rate allocation with fairness consideration for OFDMA uplink

Subcarrier, power, and rate allocation schemes for the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink are considered. A low-complexity algorithm with fairness consideration is proposed to maximize the sum rate under individual rate and transmit power constraints. The complexity reduction and fairness are achieved by performing subcarrier allocation in two steps: Initial subcarrier allocation that considers per-user fairness; and residual subcarrier allocation that further increases the sum rate. The proposed algorithm achieves superior outage performance and has linear complexity in the number of users and subcarriers, while incurring negligible sum-rate degradation when the average path-loss is the same among users.