Zone Based Resource Allocation for OFDMA Systems

This paper investigates the performance benefits of different resource allocation strategies that take advantage of permuation zones specified in WiMAX-based OFDMA systems. In particular, we propose and investigate the benefits of a sub-zone scheduling approach where each permutation zone is partitioned into sub-zones that are used for scheduling subsets of eligible users according to their prevailing link quality. The proposed sub-zone scheduling approach provides up to 30% improvement in sector throughput relative to a baseline WiMAX-based OFDMA system while maintaining outage at acceptable levels.