Proportional-fairness resource allocation for uplink OFDM-based cognitive radio systems

Abstract This paper has proposed a proportional-fairness resource allocation algorithm, including both subcarrier assignment algorithm and power allocation algorithm, for uplink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based cognitive radio (CR) systems. First, to get a better performance in the proposed system model, the influence factor ( a,b,c ) was introduced to realize the assignment of the subcarriers. Second, the transmit power of the secondary users (SUs) was allocated to the corresponding subcarriers in order to maximize the uplink capacity of the SUs subject to both power and interference constraints. With the appropriate influence factor in the subcarrier assignment, the loss of transmitted data rate arising from the fairness was minimized. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm can achieve a perfect fairness among the SUs while maximizing the system capacity simultaneously, and is of a low computation complexity.