Rate Stable Resource Allocation in OFDM Systems: From Water-filling to Queue-Balancing

This paper considers the issue of optimal subcarrier allocation in OFDMA. We show, via a counter example, that water-filling based subcarrier allocation policies, contrary to conventional wisdom, fail to provide rate-stability for an otherwise stabilizable OFDMA system. Water-filling is too myopic when considering longtime average performance, e.g. delay, queue lengths, and even long-run throughput. This is because such policies ignore variable state (queue length) information, while, in fact, such an information is necessary to guarantee rate stability and/or to minimize average delay. In this paper, we identify a policy, based on maximum weighted matching and show that such a policy achieves %100 throughput for all admissible traffic.