Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is used on the downlink of broadband wireless access (BWA) networks such as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) as it is able to offer substantial advantages such as combating channel impairments and supporting higher data rates. Also, by dynamically allocating subcarriers to users, frequency domain diversity as well as multiuser diversity can be effectively exploited so that performance can be greatly improved. The main focus of this thesis is on the development of practical resource allocation schemes for the OFDMA downlink. Imperfect Channel State Information (CSI), the limited capacity of the dedicated link used for CSI feedback, and the presence of a Connection Admission Control (CAC) unit are issues that are considered in this thesis to develop practical schemes. The design of efficient resource allocation schemes heavily depends on the CSI reported from the users to the transmitter. When the CSI is imperfect, a performance degradation is realized. It is therefore necessary to account for the imperfectness of the CSI when assigning radio resources to users. The first part of this thesis considers resource allocation strategies for OFDMA systems, where the transmitter only knows the statistical knowledge of the CSI (SCSI). The approach used shows that resources can be optimally allocated to achieve a performance that is comparable to that achieved when instantaneous CSI (ICSI) is available. The results presented show that the performance difference between the SCSI and ICSI based resource allocation schemes depends on the number of active users present in the cell, the Quality of Service (QoS) constraint, and the signal-to- noise ratio (SNR) per subcarrier. In practical systems only SCSI or CSI that is correlated to a certain extent with the true channel state can be used to perform resource allocation. An approach to quantifying the performance degradation for both cases is presented for the case where only a discrete number of modulation and coding levels are available for adaptive modulation and coding (AMC). Using the CSI estimates and the channel statistics, the approach can be used to perform resource allocation for both cases. It is shown that when a CAC unit is considered, CSI that is correlated with its present state leads to significantly higher values of the system throughput even under high user mobility. Motivated by the comparison between the correlated and statistical based resource allocation schemes, a strategy is then proposed which leads to a good tradeoff between overhead consumption and fairness as well as throughput when the presence of a CAC unit is considered. In OFDMA networks, the design of efficient CAC schemes also relies on the user CSI. The presence of a CAC unit needs to be considered when designing practical resource allocation schemes for BWA networks that support multiple service classes as it can guarantee fairness amongst them. In this thesis, a novel mechanism for CAC is developed which is based on the user channel gains and the cost of each service. This scheme divides the available bandwidth in accordance with a complete partitioning structure which allocates each service class an amount of non-overlapping bandwidth resource. In summary, the research results presented in this thesis contribute to the development of practical radio resource management schemes for BWA networks
