Abstract—In this paper, we propose an efficient scheduling scheme for fading orthogonal frequency division multiplexing multiuser networks with user fairness rate constraints. This scheme, termed as binary rate scheduling (BRS), allows at most one user to transmit at a fixed rate if the selected user has its channel gain higher than a certain threshold. BRS scheme avoids the complicated interference cancellations and the variable-rate transmissions involved in the optimal scheduling scheme, hence has very low complexity. The optimization problems of BRS for the related channel gain thresholds and weight factors are formulated with respect to both adaptive and fixed transmit power assumptions. And the optimization algorithm is developed by utilizing the decent structure of quasi-convexity of the problems. With numerical results, it is shown that BRS scheme is capable of achieving near optimal performance in both the homogeneous and heterogeneous multiuser scenarios. Particularly, in the low-rate regime, it is proved that BRS asymptotically achieves the same spectral efficiency as the optimal scheme. The results in this paper indicate that BRS scheme is a promising scheduler solution in practical wireless networks with regard to both hardware implementation and power efficiency.

Index Terms—Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), binary rate scheduling (BRS), BRS with adaptive transmit power (BRS-A), BRS with fixed transmit power (BRS-F), minimum transmit sum power (MTSP), water-filling

Cite: Xiangyu Gao and Yuesheng Zhu, "Multiuser Binary Rate Scheduling for Fading OFDM Networks with User Fairness Rate Constraints," Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 7, pp. 572-578, 2014. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.9.7.572-578