On the use of NSGA-II for multi-objective resource allocation in MIMO-OFDMA systems

This paper investigates the problem of dynamic subcarrier and bit allocation in downlink of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) Systems. Using Singular Value Decomposition, the MIMO fading channel of each subcarrier is transformed into an equivalent bank of parallel Single Input Single Output sub-channels. To achieve the capacity bound, one must solve a multiuser subcarrier allocation and the optimal bit allocation jointly. To alleviate the computational complexity of joint subcarrier and bit allocation, several suboptimal solutions have been proposed. These suboptimal solutions handle subcarrier and bits individually. We propose the use of Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA)-II, which is a multi-objective Genetic Algorithm, for joint allocation of bits and subcarriers, in the downlink of MIMO-OFDMA system. NSGA-II is intended for optimization problems involving multiple conflicting objectives. Here the two conflicting objectives are Rate Maximization and Transmit Power Minimization. The simulation results indicate remarkable improvement in terms of convergence over previous approaches involving Evolutionary algorithms. At the same time capacity achieved by the proposed algorithm is found to be comparable with that of previous algorithms.