Impact of CSI on radio resource management techniques for the OFDMA Downlink

Adaptive resource allocation can drastically increase the throughput of an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) system when the Channel State Information (CSI) is accurately known. Unfortunately, in practice, perfect CSI is rarely possible. In this paper, we consider adaptive subcarrier assignment for downlink multiuser OFDMA systems, where the transmitter has no knowledge of the instantaneous channel realizations. The problem we address is maximizing the sum-capacity of the system subject to user Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. A heuristic algorithm presented in [1] is modified in order to provide an enhanced sub-optimal solution. Numerical results show that resources can be adaptively allocated using statistical CSI (SCSI) and that such an approach allows for an important number of user QoS requirements to be met. Comparisons between the instantaneous CSI (ICSI) and SCSI based resource allocation schemes demonstrate that their performance difference is highly dependent on the number of active users present in the cell, the QoS constraint, and the transmit power.