Subcarriers-and-its allocation algorithms for downlink OFDMA-based MIMO systems

This paper proposes four resource (subcarriers-and-bits) allocation methods for OFDMA-based multiuser MIMO system. We employ adaptive modulation according to the channel state information (CSI) of each user to meet the symbol error rate (SER) requirement. The first scheme is based on transmit spatial diversity (TSD), in which the vector channel with the highest gain between the base station and specific antenna at remote terminal is chosen for transmission. The second scheme assigns subcarrier to the best user and employs spatial multiplexing on the MIMO system to further enhance the throughput. The space-division multiple-access (SDMA) scheme assigns single subcarrier simultaneously to the remote terminals with pairwise “nearly orthogonal” spatial signatures. In the fourth scheme, we propose to design the transmit beamformers based on the zero-forcing (ZF) criterion such that the multi-user interference (MUI) is completely removed. Moreover, spatial multiplexing technique is jointly exploited to achieve throughput multiplication. Numerical results demonstrate that all the proposed algorithms are simple and reliable and the fourth scheme is the best since all users are allowed to share single subcarrier.