Weighted sum throughput maximisation for cooperative relay‐aided multi‐cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access cellular networks considering partial fairness

Abstract

This study addresses resource allocation problem with partial fairness, considering weighted sum throughput maximisation for an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access system with half-duplex decode-and-forward relaying. In the system formulation, multi-cell co-channel interference as one of the critical factors in multi-cell processing has been taken into account and its effect on system performance is evaluated. It has been shown that the problem is in the form of combinatorial non-convex optimisation problems (NP-hard). Avoiding to solve NP-hard problem, the authors have made suboptimal solutions according to iterative methods to satisfy the system requirements in the best way. In this way, the resulting non-convex optimisation problem has been solved by dual Lagrangian decomposition, and iterative resource allocation algorithms are proposed to find solutions which satisfy Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions. Two resource allocation strategies based on centralised and distributed scenarios are derived to maximise the average system throughput (bit/s/Hz) considering partial fairness. Simulation results indicate that the authors’ proposed methods work better than interference threshold methods and other conventional algorithms such as single cell methods which use local information processing.