Advances in smart antennas - Dynamic multiuser resource allocation and adaptation for wireless systems

Driven by the increasing popularity of wireless broadband services, future wireless systems will witness a rapid growth of high-data-rate applications with very diverse quality of service requirements. To support such applications under limited radio resources and harsh wireless channel conditions, dynamic resource allocation, which achieves both higher system spectral efficiency and better QoS, has been identified as one of the most promising techniques. In particular, jointly optimizing resource allocation across adjacent and even nonadjacent layers of the protocol stack leads to dramatic improvement in overall system performance. In this article we provide an overview of recent research on dynamic resource allocation, especially for MIMO and OFDM systems. Recent work and open issues on cross-layer resource allocation and adaptation are also discussed. Through this article, we wish to show that dynamic resource allocation will become a key feature in future wireless communications systems as the subscriber population and service demands continue to expand.