In adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, different powers and rates can be allocated to sub-carriers optimally by water-filling. This strategy has been proved to improve the system performance significantly. However, a large signalling overhead is induced by water-filling to contain the group of presently employed mapping schemes. The faster the channel varies in time, the more frequently the large signalling overhead is needed. In this paper, to avoid such a problem, we propose that a constant rate and different powers are allocated to sub-carriers while satisfying the constraints on the transmission rate and the average bit-error rate (BER). First, an approximate relationship between BER and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is employed. Then, based on the convex optimization framework, the transmission power is optimally distributed to the used sub-carriers with an optimal constant rate. The sub-carrier assignment can be determined by an upgraded bisection method, which can be also used for other resource allocation problems. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed resource allocation strategy has better performance than water-filling with the signalling overhead considered in fast time-varying environment.
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