Proportional Fair Based Subcarrier Allocation for OFDMA System with DF Relay

This paper considers the proportional fair (PF) based subcarrier allocation problem in a multihop orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) broadcast system with decode-and-forward (DF) relays. The problem is formulated as a mixed binary integer programming problem with the objective to achieve proportional fairness among users and exploit the diversity provided by the independent frequency selective fading among hops. Since it is prohibitive to find the optimal solution, two efficient heuristic schemes are proposed. Simulation results indicate that with the same fairness performance, the proposed schemes achieve considerable capacity gain over the conventional PF scheduling method.