Optimal Power Allocation in Multicarrier Mobile Communications Using Replicator Dynamics

Most of the wireless networks in use today, such as WiFi and LTE, use multicarrier communication techniques. These systems divide the available bandwidth into a set of orthogonal subchannels. Performance in this type of systems is optimized by appropriately assigning power to each subchannel such that a total power constraint is satisfied. In this paper, we propose a dynamic resource allocation scheme based on replicator dynamics to achieve maximum spectral efficiency in a multicarrier system. We demonstrate that the population-based technique obtains the optimal water-filling solution. We illustrate the algorithm application with numerical simulations for a single-user power allocation in a common WiFi scenario. The results show the optimality and low computational cost of the proposed strategy, which can be used in the future to design resource allocation schemes in multiuser settings.