Load Management, Power and Admission Control in Downlink Cellular OFDMA Networks

We present a resource management framework for load-coupled downlink cellular OFDMA networks considering the load factor of an individual base station (BS) per resource block (RB), i.e., the number of adjacent sub-carriers (SCs), as the variable of interest in the resource management problem. The load factor of a BS per RB, which corresponds to the fraction of active SCs in the BS per RB, is an indicator of the level of resource consumption, and it affects the interference caused to that RB reused in other BSs, and thereby, results in a load-coupled OFDMA system. We first propose two distributed schemes to minimize: (i) the total load factor of the BSs (which would in turn increase the number of supportable users in the system), and (ii) the total downlink transmit power level of the BSs. Then, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for checking the feasibility of given target-rate requirements (also referred to as demand vector) for users. Accordingly, an iterative and distributed scheme is proposed to check the feasibility of a given demand vector. Next, for a priority-based load-coupled network, we propose a priority-based gradual removal algorithm to support the maximal number of low-priority users while satisfying the demands of the high-priority users. To evaluate the performance of our proposed schemes for resource management and admission control in load-coupled OFDMA networks, the theoretical investigations are complemented with Monte Carlo simulations.