Capacity-fairness controllable scheduling algorithms for single-carrier FDMA

Scheduling imposes a trade-off between sum capacity and fairness among users. In some situations, fairness needs to be given the first priority. Therefore, a scheduling algorithm which can flexibly control sum capacity and fairness is desirable. In this paper, assuming the single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA), we propose three scheduling algorithms: modified max-map, proportional fairness (PF)-map, and max-min. The available subcarriers are grouped into a number of subcarrier-blocks each having the same number of subcarriers. The scheduling is done on a subcarrier-block by subcarrier-block basis to take advantage of the channel frequency-selectivity. The same number of noncontiguous subcarrier-blocks is assigned to selected users. The trade-off between sum capacity and fairness is controlled by changing the number of simultaneously scheduling users per time-slot. Capacity, fairness, and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) when using the proposed scheduling algorithms are examined by computer simulation.