Cooperative subcarrier and power allocation in OFDM based relaying systems

The increasing use of relays in wireless communication systems is a driving force to explore innovative techniques that can improve the quality of service as well as enhance the coverage of wireless systems. Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is widely deployed in broadband wireless systems to effectively combat the frequency selectivity of the wireless fading channel. Wireless relays are used in practical OFDM-based wireless systems such as WiMAX to increase the capacity and diversity order of the system. To fully exploit the benefits of OFDMA, relaying systems require efficient management of resources, including power and subcarriers. The difficulty in resource allocation in a relaying system is the non-convexity of the optimization problem caused by the inter-relationship of all the resources through the relay station. Therefore, suboptimal and heuristic algorithms are proposed to assign power and subcarriers to the users in the relaying system while maintaining flexible fairness in resource allocation.;In this dissertation, we improve the efficiency of subcarrier and power allocation algorithms with flexible fairness in the downlink of an amplify-and-forward (AF) OFDM relaying system. We propose an asymptotically fair subcarrier allocation algorithm that provides flexibility in the fairness index for possible improvement in the total throughput of the system by using a group-based approach. We investigate the problem of power allocation for an AF relaying scheme by considering three different objective functions: average SNR, average BER, and outage probability. The results are presented for various relay locations and different total power in the system. It is shown that the solution to the power allocation problem does not depend on the objective function when the relay is closer to the mobile user for different objective functions. By deriving the capacity of the AF relaying, a new parameter, called cooperation coefficient, is introduced to quantify the cooperation level from the relaying links in the data rate of the mobile station. Assuming flat power allocation and using the cooperation coefficient parameter, a cooperative subcarrier allocation algorithm is proposed that increases the total throughput of a multi-user OFDM relaying system by approximately 15%. We also propose a two-step solution for subcarrier and power allocation of an AF relaying system. In the first step, the total power is allocated to the users and relays based on the power ratio found for the single-relay system. In the second step, subcarriers are assigned to the users based on the cooperative subcarrier allocation algorithms. Based on our finding, the total throughput of the system improves by 25% using the two-step procedure. By applying the proposed asymptotically fair idea to the two-step subcarrier and power allocation, we maintain a flexible fairness and further increase the total throughput in an OFDM relaying system.