Control Overheads Optimization in Wireless Resource Allocation Problems

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

 

Jie Ren, Presenter

Dr. John Walsh, Advisor

 

Abstract

Under many traditional resource allocation and link adaptation architectures of modern wireless communication systems, such as those utilized in the Long Term Evolution 3GPP standard, channel quality indicators (CQI) and other channel parameters are sent as uplink feedback, and these are utilized to determine which user should get which resource blocks as well as deciding the coding scheme. Then the base station must signal the resource decision on the downlink as overhead control information in addition to the data to be transmitted to the user itself. These re- source decisions control information, along with the channel quality feedback utilized to make them, create control overheads in the multiuser OFDMA system that are surprisingly large, with the control information such as resource decisions and reference signals typically occupying roughly a quarter to a third of all downlink transmission in the LTE standard. Inspired by this observation, in this dissertation, we focus on determining how to efficiently encode control information salient for resource allocation from the view of both information theory and communication.