Adaptive Power Control in Multi-Cell OFDM Systems: A Noncooperative Game with Power Unit Based Utility

In this paper, we develop a new distributed adaptive power control framework for multi-cell OFDM systems based on the game theory. A specific utility function is defined considering the users’ achieved average utility per power, i.e., power unit based utility. We solve the subcarrier allocation issue naturally as well as the power control. Each user tries to maximize its utility by adjusting the transmit power on each subcarrier. A Nash equilibrium for the game is shown to exist and the numerical results show that our proposal outperforms the pure water-filling algorithm in terms of efficiency and fairness. key words: multi-cell OFDM, power control, noncooperative game, power unit based utility