Joint Scheduling and Resource Allocation in OFDMA Downlink Systems via ACK/NAK Feedback

In this paper, we consider the problem of joint scheduling and resource allocation in the OFDMA downlink, with the goal of maximizing an expected long-term goodput-based utility subject to an instantaneous sum-power constraint, and where the feedback to the base station consists only of ACK/NAKs from recently scheduled users. We first establish that the optimal solution is a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which is impractical to implement. In response, we propose a greedy approach to joint scheduling and resource allocation that maintains a posterior channel distribution for every user, and has only polynomial complexity. For frequency-selective channels with Markov time-variation, we then outline a recursive method to update the channel posteriors, based on the ACK/NAK feedback, that is made computationally efficient through the use of particle filtering. To gauge the performance of our greedy approach relative to that of the optimal POMDP, we derive a POMDP performance upper-bound. Numerical experiments show that, for slowly fading channels, the performance of our greedy scheme is relatively close to the upper bound, and much better than fixed-power random user scheduling (FP-RUS), despite its relatively low complexity.