A Selective Cluster Index Scheduling Method in OFDMA

OFDM is an attractive solution for the design of future wireless communications due to its robustness to dispersion in multipath environments. Additional diversity gains can be realised by OFDMA by exploiting not only the temporal fading, but also spectral fading, that can result in higher rates due to increased diversity. A scheduler exploiting multiuser diversity imposes strict feedback requirements as channel quality information is required for every user's feedback unit with a feedback rate at least equal to the coherence time of the channel. The instantaneous signal to noise ratio is the most commonly used metric to quantify users' channel conditions. In OFDMA, the overhead due to feedback transmission increases significantly due to the fact that signal to noise ratio is required in the frequency domain, for every subcarrier of the OFDM symbol, which can potentially mitigate any multiuser diversity gains. This paper proposes a reduced feedback OFDMA design that requires very limited feedback information on a clustered subcarrier basis, whilst maintaining high downlink rates via opportunistic beamforming with multiple weighting vector transmission from the base station. This scheme is shown to be quite robust, as it can be easily adapted to variable channel conditions without any significant increase in complexity.