I. Introduction
The ambitious design goal of the 3GPP UTRAN long-term evolution (LTE) is to provide spectral efficiency gains in the order of 3–4 compared to e.g. Release 6 high-speed downlink packet access (HSPDA) [1], [4]. For the LTE downlink OFDMA is considered to be the best access technology for providing high scalability up to large system bandwidths and to facilitate advanced frequency-domain scheduling methods. As LTE is optimized for packet data transfer only, the packet scheduler functionality assumes great significance. In this paper we study specifically the potential of frequency-domain multiplexing of users according to their instantaneous radio conditions. This is most often referred to as frequency domain packet scheduling (FDPS), although time-domain scheduling is inherent as well.