Throughput Optimization of Dynamic OFDM-FDMA Systems with Inband Signaling

Dynamically assigning subcarriers to terminals in an OFDM-FDMA system optimizes various performance metrics. However, it also requires that terminals are periodically informed about their assigned subcarriers. Hence, the signaling overhead has to be taken into account for both system design and performance evaluation. We investigate two possibilities how to design an inband signaling system, with either a fixed or variable overhead per MAC frame and characterize them as linear optimization problems. We provide performance results for both schemes under a varying number of subcarriers and different terminal speeds and show that the variable scheme outperforms the fixed one for low speeds, that the performance difference vanishes as terminal speeds go up, but also that the fixed scheme is more sensitive to variations in the number of subcarriers.