Joint user pairing and resource allocation for LTE uplink transmission

In this paper, we investigate joint user pairing and resource allocation under the practical constraints in single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) LTE uplink systems. We first introduce a joint optimal algorithm based on branch-and-bound search as a benchmark. To reduce complexity, we divide the joint optimization problem into two subproblems: user pairing and resource allocation. For both these subproblems, we develop several low-complexity algorithms by exploiting the properties of the application of the optimization problem itself. It is shown by the simulation results that the proposed algorithms have better throughput and fairness than the conventional algorithms in and in for LTE uplink no matter whether power control is perfect or not.