On the Group Proportional Fairness of Frequency Domain Resource Allocation in L-SC-FDMA based LTE uplink

Localized single carrier frequency division multiple access (L-SC-FDMA) has been selected as the uplink transmission scheme in 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) due to its low Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) over OFDMA in general and high rate-sum capacity over Interleaved SC-FDMA in particular. This paper presents virtual clusters based proportional fairness and resource allocation scheme. Virtual cluster-based proportional fairness (VCPF) scheduler exploits the link adaptation information available at MAC layer to form virtual clusters. The distributed proportional fairness scheduler ensures a minimum throughput for all users in the coverage area by assigning contiguous RBs, proportional to the throughput and the number of users in a particular cluster or group. Simulations have been performed using practical scenario of uniformly distributed users in Rayleigh faded coverage area and design formulas have been devised for network planning to get the best possible fairness with promising level of quality of service (QoS).