Green Resource Allocation for Multiple OFDMA Based Networks: A Survey

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is a popular and widely accepted multiple access technique to provide high data rate services in a mobile environment in the area of wireless communications. OFDMA can provide better flexibility in allocating the radio spectra by utilizing subcarrier allocations, scheduling, and energy control to obtain multi-dimension diversity gains. Due to its resource allocation flexibility, OFDMA has been widely used as a green air interface technology for the emerging broadband wireless access networks. This paper extensively addresses the integration of green OFDMA to the future air interface technologies, for instance:two-tier cellular, multi radio access technologies (RATs), FemtoCell, and relay networks. The main focus of the paper is to review and analyze the current OFDMA techniques to address the green resource allocation in multiuser diversity, where the critical constraints are the computational complexity, energy efficiency, and the sub-channel assignment. The future trend of OFDMA based networks will aim to maximize the energy efficiency of the exclusive channel assignment through a joint sub-channel and power allocation to accommodate high data traffic networks specially the relay based 5G cellular networks.