QoS‐driven jointly optimal subcarrier pairing and power allocation for OFDM amplify‐and‐forward relay systems

SUMMARY In this paper, we investigate the quality‐of‐service (QoS) driven subcarrier pairing and power allocation for two‐hop amplify‐and‐forward OFDM relay systems. By integrating the concept of effective capacity, our goal is to maximize the system throughput subject to a given delay QoS constraint. We propose a jointly optimal subcarrier pairing and power allocation scheme, which can be implemented with two separate steps. First, pair the subcarriers over the source‐relay channel and relay‐destination channel by the descending order of the subcarriers’ channel gains. Second, by making use of the derived equivalent end‐to‐end channel gains of the subcarrier pairs, optimally allocate power over the subcarrier pairs, and then optimally partition the power of the subcarrier pairs between the source and the relay. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme can efficiently provide different levels of delay QoS guarantees, even if under stringent delay QoS constraints. The simulation results also verify that our proposed scheme shows significant superiorities over the other existing schemes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.