Design Tradeoffs in OFDMA Uplink Trafc Channels

Manyuan Shen, Guoqing Li and Hui Liu

Department of Electrical Engineering, Box 352500 University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195 {mshen,lgq,hliu}@ee.washington.edu

Abstract This paper addresses the tradeoff issues in OFDMA uplink data channel design. For xed and portable applications where the propagation channels are near static, we show that maximum throughput can be achieved through intelligent channel allocation when uplink channels are congured with minimum frequency diversity. The total uplink throughput under different congurations is presented. For mobile services that require sufcient frequency diversity, we evaluate the mutual information that quanties the frequency diversity gain for rapid fading channels. Using the results presented, designers of OFDMA system can determine the optimum trafc channel conguration based on the types of services supported by the network.

I. I NTRODUCTION In the past few years, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has emerged as one of the prime modem schemes for broadband wireless networks. For multiuser communications, one way of applying OFDM is to divide the total bandwidth into trafc channels (a subset of OFDM subcarriers) so that multiple access can be accommodated in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) fashion [1], [2], see for example, IEEE 802.16a. For xed or portable applications, a superior advantage of OFDMA over other OFDM based multiple access methods, e.g., OFDM-TDMA, is its capability of exploiting the socalled multiuser diversity [1], [3]. By avoiding null trafc channels due to deep fading and/or narrowband interference, the system can potentially outperform channel-averaging techniques by a factor of 2 to 3 in spectrum efciency [4], [5]. While fading avoidance is less feasible for fast-varying channels, the benet of OFDMA-enabled interference avoidance remains. In addition, OFDMA enjoys the nest granularity and better uplink power efciency than traditional OFDM/TDMA systems. The trafc channel conguration (i.e., how OFDM subcarriers are divided into trafc channels) is an important parameter in OFDMA system design. As will become clear in the ensuing sections, design optimization of OFDMA conguration has a signicant impact on the network capacity and performance in both xed and mobile scenarios. For systems that support
This work was supported in part by the Ofce of Naval Research (ONR) under Grant No. N00014-97-1-0475, and the National Science Foundation under Grants CISE-9901377 and ITR-0096032

mixed services (xed, portable, and mobile), conicting requirements present a signicant design challenge. The objective of this paper is to systematically analyze the effect of trafc channel conguration on system performance. Toward this end, we rst evaluate the total throughput against different trafc channel congurations, assuming judicious channel allocation is employed to capitalize on the frequency selectivity of uplink channels. The result indicates that the maximum system capacity can be achieved when the trafc channels are congured with the highest frequency selectivity (therefore, the least frequency diversity). On the other hand, sufcient frequency diversity is essential in coping with rapid fading channels. Also derived in this paper is the BER performance for mobile services with xed modulation scheme. The results presented allow OFDMA system designers to quantify the tradeoffs in different scenarios, thus arrive at the optimum conguration based on the types of services supported. The remainder of the presentation is organized as follows. In Section II, the system model is described and the design parameters are specied. Section III analyzes the total uplink data rate with channel allocation for xed and portable applications. In Section IV, the BER performance of mobile system is evaluated. The paper is then concluded in Section V. II. OFDMA S YSTEMS A. OFDMA Design Parameters An OFDMA system is dened as one in which a subset of OFDM subcarriers forms an OFDMA trafc channel, each of which is assigned exclusively to one user at any time [1], [2], [6]. Consider an OFDMA system with a total number of N subcarriers and K users. We divide the N subcarriers into L trafc channels, each with M subcarriers: N = L M . Theoretically, the mapping between the trafc channel and subcarriers can be arbitrary. In practice however, only regular mapping is utilized for easy implementation. In this paper, we concentrate on regular mapping of the trafc channel where the M subcarriers in each trafc channel are further divided into M/Mc clusters, with each cluster having Mc consecutive subcarriers. Spacing between two clusters is Md = N/(M/Mc ) - see Fig. 1 for illustration. Under these assumptions, a trafc channel conguration, C, can be uniquely dened as {(M, Mc )}. For example, each trafc channel in Fig. 1 has 8 subcarriers, divided into two clusters

Mc

Md

Fig. 1.


trafc channel conguration

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Fig. 2.

Transmitter structure

each with 4 subcarrier; the distance between two clusters are 16. Hence, this conguration is denoted as {(8, 4)}. The trafc channel size M is usually determined based on application requirements of the system and cannot be chosen arbitrarily 1 . In this paper, we are mainly interested in investigating how different choices of the cluster size Mc affect the overall system performance, given a small set of trafc channel sizes (e.g., M = 16, 32). As will be shown in the following sections, different choices of Mc provide various tradeoffs in xed and mobile applications. B. Coding Architectures For clarity, the schematic of the coded OFDMA transmission system is shown in Fig. 2. At the transmitter, information bits from a user are rst encoded by the channel encoder. After interleaved by a bit-wise interleaver, the encoded bits are then mapped to modulation symbols. The modulated symbols are loaded onto the the trafc channel allocated to that user. At the receiver (e.g., the base station), demodulated bits from OFDM signals are decoded with each encoded block and data bits of each user are restored. C. Channel Model We can describe an OFDMA system with proper cyclic prex as a set of parallel Gaussian channels. Specically, arrange the M transmitted signals within the lth trafc channel as T xl (d) = (x(d, l1 ) x(d, l2 ) ... x(d, lM )) (1)
size of the trafc channel decides the granularity of resource allocation. It also dictates the minimum block size of channel coding, and consequently, the delay of a wireless packet network.
1 The

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where d is the OFDM symbol index and l1 , ..., lM are the sub-carrier indices of trafc channel l. Accordingly dene the received signals, the channel responses, and noise with variance 2 into vector forms yl (d) = hl (d) = nl (d) = (y(d, l1 ) y(d, l2 ) ... y(d, lM ))
T T T



  ( ' # & %

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1 ) ' 20(      

(2) (3) (4)

(h(d, l1 ) h(d, l2 ) ... h(d, lM ))

(n(d, l1 ) n(d, l2 ) ... n(d, lM )) .

Then the system can be described as yl (d) = xl (d) hl (d) + n(d) (5) where denotes element-by-element multiplication. If needed, a subscript ()k will be added to denote the user index. For the static channels, unless stated otherwise, we will drop d to simplify notation as hl since the channel remains the same over the period of interest. III. U PLINK T HROUGHPUT WITH CHANNEL LOADING For xed or portable services with static or semi-static channels, radio resource allocation can be implemented at the base station and users are notied of the channel assignment through a multiple access protocol. An example is given in [7]. Basically, the base station gathers users frequency-selective channel information from uplink and makes a judicious resource allocation decision. The resource allocation decision is periodically sent back to the users. Users then employ adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) scheme on each trafc channel assigned to them according to the channel SNRs [7]. Using ACM, the achievable data rate of the kth user in trafc channel l, rlk , can be expressed as a function of the average SNR, vlk 2 rlk = M g(vlk ). (6) The actual rate-SNR function g() depends on the available ACM schemes and the BER targeted. Fig. 3 shows the ratepower function g() used in this paper [8]. It is obtained by using the 64-state convolution code of various rate (1/2, 2/3, 4/5, and 8/7) combined with different modulation schemes(QPSK, 16QAM, and 64QAM). A BER of 2 104 is assumed. Assuming the total uplink channel responses are normalized, the signal power over the lth trafc channel, plk , is calculated as, plk = hH hlk . (7) lk Therefore, the average SNR experienced by the kth user on the lth trafc channel, vlk , is given as follows plk vlk = . (8) M 2 Using the total uplink data rate as a performance measure, the OFDMA resource allocation algorithm will always allocate a trafc channel to the user with the maximum data rate in that channel. In other words, rl,max = max{rl1 , rl2 , ...rlK } l = 1, , L. (9)

4  0

1 0

2 To simplify the analysis, we assume the average SNR of all subcarriers across a trafc channel is used to determine the ACM selection.

5.5
64QAM 7/8

1
64QAM 5/6

5 4.5 Rate (bits/subcarrier) 4 3.5 3 2.5

0.9

1 2 3

64QAM 3/4

0.8
64QAM 2/3

0.7
16QAM 7/8 16QAM 5/6 16QAM 3/4

0.6 5 CDF 0.5

16QAM 2/3

0.4 2 1.5 1 0.5 0

16QAM 1/2 QPSK 7/8 QPSK 5/6 QPSK 3/4 QPSK 2/3 QPSK 1/2

0.3

0.2

0.1

10

12 SNR (dB)

14

16

18

20

22

5 Pl,max

10

Fig. 3.

rate-SNR function g()

Fig. 4. CDF of Pl,max , K = 64, TU channel, trafc channel conguration: C1 = {(16, 1)}, C2 = {(16, 2)}, C3 = {(16, 4)}, C4 = {(16, 8)}, and C5 = {(16, 16)}

Note that the rate-SNR function g() is non-decreasing, the allocation algorithm hence will allocate a trafc channel to the user with the highest SNR, or equivalently, the user with the highest power plk . Then (9) can be rewritten as pl,max rl,max = M g , (10) M 2 where pl,max = max{pl1 , pl2 , ...plK }. (11) As a result, the total uplink data rate is
L L

With regular mapping of static channels, the correlation matrix Rhlk hlk is same for all k and l. Therefore, all plk has the same probability density function (pdf) fp (x), which can be calculated as the inverse Fourier transform of p (jw). According to (12), we need to derive the pdf of pl,max in order to evaluate the system data rate. Assuming channels from different users are independent, through straightforward manipulations it can be shown that the pdf fp max (x) = KFp (x)K1 fp (x) (15)

rsys =
l=1

rl,max = M
l=1

pl,max g . M 2 of the

(12) system (13)

Then the normalized (bits/subcarrier), is

throughput

rsys = rsys /N. A. Impact of trafc channel conguration on throughput

where Fp (x) is the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of plk . Clearly, all pl,max for l = 1, ..., L has the same pdf, and we drop the subscript l to simplify the notation. Assuming all eigenvalues m are distinct, the pdf of pmax can be derived from (14) and (15) as 3
M1 K1 M 1

The underlying idea of channel allocation is to capitalize on the frequency selectivity of a wide-band OFDMA channel. Theoretically, the higher the channel variation across frequency, the larger the total capacity. In this section, we investigate the impact of different trafc channel congurations on the overall throughput by deriving the statistics of signal power plk under different trafc channel congurations the statistics of pl,max after channel allocation, and consequently, the total uplink throughput It can be shown that plk , a random variable, has the characteristic function p (jw) = 1 1 jwm m=1
M1

fpmax (x) = K
m=1

m (1 e

x/m

m x/m e m=1 m

where
M1

m =
i=1,i=m

m m i

With the pdf of pmax in hand, the average normalized throughput of the whole system is calculated from (12) and (13) as pmax E [sys ] = E g r . (16) M 2 Fig. 4 gives an example of the CDF of Pl,max for ve different trafc channel congurations. It is seen that the cluster conguration C5 , which corresponds to the one with the highest frequency selectivity and the least frequency diversity, has the highest signal power. As the group size decreases, the CDF gradually shifts left.
3 The pdf of P max in the case of equal eigenvalues can also be obtained in the similar way.

(14)

where 1 , ..., M1 are the M1 non-zero eigenvalues of correlation matrix Rhlk hlk = E{hlk hH }. Due to the space limit, lk we omit the detailed derivation that will be presented in the journal version of this paper.

IV. BER PERFORMANCE WITHOUT CHANNEL LOADING While the results from the previous section clearly favor trafc channel congurations with higher frequency selectivity, the situation is the opposite for mobile applications. For users with fast fading channels, it is usually impractical for the basestation to perform optimum channel allocation due to the large overhead4 . The rapid varying channel also makes the application of ACM very difcult. In this scenario, the design objective is to have the minimum error rate at a given Es /N0 (or the lowest Es /N0 that can achieve a target BER) with a xed coding and modulation scheme. In this section, we analyze the effect of different trafc channel congurations on the systems BER performance. A. Diversity gain of different trafc channel congurations To compare the performance of different trafc channel congurations independent of the detailed coding/interleaver scheme, we calculate the achievable mutual information with different trafc channel congurations, assuming perfect channel state information (CSI) is available to the receiver. As we will see, their numerical evaluations provide an accurate prediction of the performance gap between different trafc channel congurations. For OFDMA systems, the coding block usually spans several OFDM symbols to in order to provide sufcient time diversity. Let x, y, and h, be the transmitted signal, the received signal, and the channel response of a sub-carrier within a coding block. For bit interleaved coded modulation scheme depicted in Fig. 2, we can obtain the mutual information between x and y, conditional on h as [9]
J1
Normalized system throughput [bits per subcarrier]

5.5

4.5

3.5

2.5 config 1 config 2 config 3 config 4 config 5

1.5

8 Es/N0 [dB]

10

12

14

16

Fig. 5. Average normalized throughput of the overall system , K = 64, TU channel, trafc channel conguration: C1 = {(16, 1)}, C2 = {(16, 2)}, C3 = {(16, 4)}, C4 = {(16, 8)}, and C5 = {(16, 16)}

probability in wireless fading channels. The outage probability is dened as the probability that the channel cannot support a given information rate r, Pout (r) = P (I(x; y|h) < r). (21)

For a targeted outage probability Ptarget , the outage mutual information is the largest r such that Pout (r) < Ptarget . Numerical results for outage mutual information can be obtained by evaluating (17) under different trafc channel setups in a Monte-Carlo integration fashion. V. D ESIGN T RADEOFFS A. Fixed and portable services Fig. 5 compares the normalized throughput of the overall system with different trafc channel congurations by evaluating (16). Five congurations are considered. In our simulation, we use the Typical urban (TU, non-hilly) power delay proles dened in COST207 [11]. The OFDMA system has a bandwidth of 8MHz, N = 1024 subcarriers, and M = 16 subcarriers in each trafc channel. It is clearly shown that the trafc channel conguration C5 , which corresponds to the largest cluster size Mc = M , has the highest system throughput. At a given Es /N0 , the throughput of C5 (least frequency diversity, highest channel variation) is about 30% higher than that of C1 (maximum frequency diversity, least channel variation). From another angle, in order to obtain the same overall data rate the required Es /N0 with C1 is about 3.5dB higher than that with optimum conguration C5 . Note that the the data rate curves at out at high Es /N0 range due to the diminish return of data rate vs. SNR of the ACM scheme (the highest rate being 5.25 bits/symbol for 64QAM with 7/8 coding). B. Mobile services Fig. 6 shows results for the mutual information at a practical outage probability (Pout = 0.01) with ve trafc channel congurations. The normalized Doppler frequency used is fm Ts = 0.05. It is seen that to achieve a certain mutual

I(x; y|h) =
j=0

I(bj ; y|h).

(17)

Here, J is the total number of bits carried in one constellation symbol, and I(bj ; y|h) is the conditional mutual information for the j-th bit bj , which is calculated by, j j {0,1} P (y|b , h) b I(bj ; y|h) = 1 Ebj ,y log2 (18) P (y|bj , h) For the conditional pdf of y, we have 1 P (y|bj , h) = P (y|, h) x |X (bj )| j
xX (b )

(19) (20)

1 |X (bj )|

xX (bj )

x 1 |yh|2 e 22 2

where X (bj ) is the subset of constellation symbols that complies with the bit value at j th label position as required by bj . Since I(x; y|h) is a random variable whose statistics is determined by the characteristics of the fast fading trafc channel, we resort to the concept of outage mutual information [10], which is closely related to the code word error
4 channel allocation at an update rate lower than the Doppler frequency will yield a minimum gain.

3.5 diversity gain, theretical diversity gain, simulation result channel estimation loss, theretical channel estimation loss, simulation result

1.8

mutual information [bits per subcarrier]

1.6 2.5 1.4 gain/loss [dB] config 1 config 2 config 3 config 4 config 5 0 5 10 15 2

1.2

1.5

1 1

0.8

0.6

0.5

0.4

Es/N0 [dB]

0 C1

C2

C3 configuration

C4

C5

Fig. 6. outage mutual information with Pout = 0.01, trafc channel conguration: C1 = {(16, 1)}, C2 = {(16, 2)}, C3 = {(16, 4)}, C4 = {(16, 8)}, and C5 = {(16, 16)}

Fig. 7. diversity gain vs. channel estimation loss, TU channel fm Ts = 0.05

information, the required SNR with different trafc channel conguration varies. At outage mutual information of 1 bit/subcarrier, which corresponds to QPSK modulation with 1/2 coding, the required SNR with trafc channel conguration C1 is the lowest among all trafc channel conguration. The required SNR increases as the cluster size Mc becomes larger, indicating the performance loss due to lack of frequency diversity. Another factor that must be considered in practice is the channel estimation loss. Unlike xed scenarios where the channel state information can be reliably estimated with sufcient samples, estimation of rapid varying channel depends critically on the structural of the trafc channels. In general, trafc channels congured with more frequency diversity (thus less correlation) are more difcult to estimate. Fig. 7 plots the diversity gain vs. the channel estimation loss. for different trafc channel congurations. The simulation result for diversity gain is obtained by comparing the required Es /N0 with different congurations to achieve a BER of 2 104 , using perfect CSI. The channel estimation loss is obtained by calculating the Es /N0 gaps between the perfect CSI and the estimated CSI, again at a BER of 2104 [12]. It is seen that our analysis predicts both gains/losses accurately. For the channel studied, the results indicate that conguration C3 brings the best tradeoff in terms of overall system performance. C. Mixed services For networks that support mixed services, the best tradeoff depends on many variables including the ratio of xed/portable and mobile users. Results present herein can be used as guidelines for the multidimensional optimization problem. VI. C ONCLUSIONS In this paper, we have studied the effect of trafc channel conguration on the OFDMA system performance. The uplink throughput with channel allocation and the system BER

without channel allocation have been derived under different congurations. The following results are observed: For static/semi-static channel with channel loading, the optimum trafc channel conguration is the one with the highest frequency selectivity (less diversity). For rapid fading channel, the choice of trafc channel conguration affects both the diversity gain and the implementation loss due to channel estimation. The optimum trafc channel conguration should be selected based on the service types of the system, and more specically, the planned ratio of xed/portable vs. mobile users in the network. R EFERENCES
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