  Adaptive OFDMA has recently been recognized as a promising technique for
providing high spectral efficiency in future broadband wireless systems. The
research over the last decade on adaptive OFDMA systems has focused on adapting
the allocation of radio resources, such as subcarriers and power, to the
instantaneous channel conditions of all users. However, such "fast" adaptation
requires high computational complexity and excessive signaling overhead. This
hinders the deployment of adaptive OFDMA systems worldwide. This paper proposes
a slow adaptive OFDMA scheme, in which the subcarrier allocation is updated on
a much slower timescale than that of the fluctuation of instantaneous channel
conditions. Meanwhile, the data rate requirements of individual users are
accommodated on the fast timescale with high probability, thereby meeting the
requirements except occasional outage. Such an objective has a natural chance
constrained programming formulation, which is known to be intractable. To
circumvent this difficulty, we formulate safe tractable constraints for the
problem based on recent advances in chance constrained programming. We then
develop a polynomial-time algorithm for computing an optimal solution to the
reformulated problem. Our results show that the proposed slow adaptation scheme
drastically reduces both computational cost and control signaling overhead when
compared with the conventional fast adaptive OFDMA. Our work can be viewed as
an initial attempt to apply the chance constrained programming methodology to
wireless system designs. Given that most wireless systems can tolerate an
occasional dip in the quality of service, we hope that the proposed methodology
will find further applications in wireless communications.
