Subcarrier Allocation Based on Correlated Equilibrium in Multi-Cell OFDMA Systems

In uplink Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems, efficient resource allocation can greatly improve system performance. In this paper, taking throughput, inter cell interference and complexity into account, the authors present a game theoretical approach to perform distributed subcarrier allocation for multi cell OFDMA systems with limited Base Station (BS) coordination. Firstly, they construct a multi cell resource allocation game. Creatively, the subcarrier is viewed as a game player to choose the most satisfying user and the BS acts as a referee or a coordinator. Then, they introduce the correlated equilibrium which helps the non-cooperative players coordinate their strategies, hence, achieves better performance compared to Nash equilibrium. Particularly, they point out the condition under which the correlated equilibrium is Pareto efficient.