Resource Allocation and Adaptive Modulation in Uplink SC-FDMA Systems

In this paper, we study joint power and sub-channel allocation, and adaptive modulation in Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) which is adopted as the multiple access scheme for the uplink in the 3GPP-LTE standard. A sum-utility maximization problem is considered. Unlike OFDMA, in addition to the restriction of allocating a sub-channel to one user at most, the multiple sub-channels allocated to a user in SC-FDMA should be consecutive as well. This renders the resource allocation problem prohibitively difficult and the standard optimization tools (e.g., Lagrange dual approach widely used for OFDMA, etc.) can not help towards its optimal solution. We propose a novel optimization framework for the solution of this problem which is inspired from the recently developed canonical duality theory. We first formulate the optimization problem as binary-integer programming problem, and then transform this binary-integer programming problems into a continuous space canonical dual problem that is a concave maximization problem. Based on the solution of the continuous space dual problem, we derive joint power and sub-channel allocation algorithm whose computational complexity is polynomial. We provide conditions under which the proposed algorithms are optimal. We also propose an adaptive modulation scheme which selects an appropriate modulation strategy for each user. We compare the proposed algorithm with the existing algorithms in the literature to assess their performance. The results show a tremendous performance gain.