Downlink resource allocation for evolved UTRAN and WiMAX cellular systems

The future broadband wireless cellular systems evolved UTRAN (E-UTRAN) and WiMAX are receiving a lot of interest in recent years. Both systems deploy orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) physical layer consisting of large number of mutually orthogonal sub-carriers. This physical layer provides high robustness against multi-path effects, high flexibility in allocation of the physical resources, high bandwidth scalability and relatively easy combination with Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) transmission and reception. In this study we investigate several algorithms for allocation of the downlink resources for E-UTRAN and WiMAX cellular systems. The goal of the study is to see the differences in downlink sector and user throughput, and user throughput versus distance from the reference base station for the resource allocation algorithms: reuse-one, reuse-three, soft re-use, reuse partitioning, proportional fair and maximum C/I. Additionally, we observe the difference in performance between E-UTRAN and WiMAX under the conditions selected in this study. The evaluations are done via MATLAB simulations of a cellular system with one central three-sectored site surrounded with two tiers of interfering three-sector sites.