Optimal power control in OFDMA cellular networks

This article addresses the problem of allocating users to radio resources in the downlink of an OFDMA cellular system. We consider a classical multicellular environment with a realistic interference model and a margin adaptive approach, i.e., we aim at minimizing total transmission power while maintaining a certain given rate for each user. We discuss computational complexity issues of the resulting model and present a heuristic approach that finds optima under suitable conditions or reasonably good solutions in the general case. Computational experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic in a comparison with both a commercial state-of-the-art optimization solver and other approaches from the literature.