Dynamic resource allocation algorithm in multi-user cooperative OFDMA systems: considering QoS and fairness constraints

Wireless transmission systems are constrained by several parameters such as the available spectrum bandwidth, mobile battery energy, transmission channel impairments and users’ minimum quality-of-service. In this paper, a new strategy is investigated that aims at improving the allocation of resources in a dual hop OFDMA cooperative network consisting in multi source–destination pairs and multiple decode-and-forward relays. First, the joint optimization of three types of resources: power, sub-channel and relay nodes, is formulated as a problem of subchannel-relay assignment and power allocation, with the objective of minimizing overall transmission power under the bit-error-rate and data rate constraints. However, the optimal solution to the optimization problem is computationally complex to obtain and may be unfair. Assuming knowledge of the instantaneous channel gains for all links in the entire network, an iterative three-step resource allocation algorithm with low complexity is proposed. In order to guarantee the fairness of users, several fairness criteria are also proposed to provide attractive trade-offs between network performance (i.e. overall transmission power, average network lifetime and average outage probability) and fairness to all users. Numerical studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in two practical scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed allocation algorithm achieves an efficient trade-off between network performance and fairness among users.