Hybrid Scheduling and Broadcast with Minimum Rates in OFDM

Abstract: Downlink transmissions with minimum rate requirements over OFDM channels are commonly done by means of scheduling algorithms. However, regarding it from an information theoretical point of view, this is not optimum since broadcast techniques can achieve larger rates. The drawbacks of optimum broadcast algorithms are that the signaling overhead is larger than for scheduling and also the computational complexity is much larger. In this paper we propose a suboptimum algorithm which overcomes these points. This algorithm is a hybrid algorithm combining scheduling with broadcast approaches. Thus, it also combines advantages of both methods. 1