Fair multiuser channel allocation for OFDMA networks using Nash bargaining solutions and coalitions

TLDR

The problem is to maximize overall system rate under each user’s power and minimum rate constraints while ensuring fairness among users. The paper proposes a fair scheme to allocate subcarriers, rates, and power for multiuser OFDMA systems. The authors introduce a generalized proportional‑fairness criterion based on Nash bargaining and coalitions, and develop a two‑user bargaining algorithm followed by a multi‑user algorithm that selects optimal coalition pairs for resource allocation. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms achieve fair allocation, deliver overall system rates comparable to a total‑rate maximizing scheme, outperform a max‑min fairness scheme, and run with per‑iteration complexity O(K²/N log₂N + K⁴).

Abstract

In this paper, a fair scheme to allocate subcarrier, rate, and power for multiuser orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access systems is proposed. The problem is to maximize the overall system rate, under each user's maximal power and minimal rate constraints, while considering the fairness among users. The approach considers a new fairness criterion, which is a generalized proportional fairness based on Nash bargaining solutions and coalitions. First, a two-user algorithm is developed to bargain subcarrier usage between two users. Then a multiuser bargaining algorithm is developed based on optimal coalition pairs among users. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms not only provide fair resource allocation among users, but also have a comparable overall system rate with the scheme maximizing the total rate without considering fairness. They also have much higher rates than that of the scheme with max-min fairness. Moreover, the proposed iterative fast implementation has the complexity for each iteration of only O(K/sup 2/Nlog/sub 2/N+K/sup 4/), where N is the number of subcarriers and K is the number of users.