2 scheme in various scenarios. Moreover, comparisons with the upper and lower bounds provide insight on the performance gap between the proposed schemes and the optimal solution. Dynamic resource allocation plays a central role in the air interface design of state-of-the- art OFDMA-based cellular technologies. In this paper, we focus our attention on maximizing the overall network throughput by optimizing the allocation of resources (i.e., subcarriers and powers) jointly in a multi-cell uplink OFDMA network. The goal is to develop efficient resource allocation schemes that takes into account the inter-cell interference (ICI) while considering universal frequency reuse. The solution of such problem is difficult to achieve optimally due to its NP hard combinatorial nature and high dimensionality. I. INTRODUCTION The sum rate maximization problem is extensively studied for the downlink in OFDMA networks. The optimal strategy in the downlink is to separately optimize subcarrier and power allocation, i.e., allocate a subcarrier to the user with best channel and then perform water-filling over the allocated subcarriers [1]. However, the problem becomes more challenging in the uplink scenario due to the individual power constraint at each user. Simply allocating a subcarrier to the user with best channel quality may affect the network performance considerably, as some active users may have better channel gains but low transmission powers on a specific subcarrier. Most of the recent work in the context of multi-cell OFDMA networks [7], [8], aims at minimizing the overall transmitted power, i.e., linear objective with pre-defined rate constraints. In [9], the authors investigated scaling laws for upper and lower bounds of the downlink capacity in the asymptotic regime. Furthermore, in some recent literature, low complexity distributed game theoretic solutions are also studied. However, the schemes are iterative and optimality is not guaranteed [10]. An auction based approach is discussed in [11], where the authors proposed a joint auction and dual decomposition based technique for the resource allocation problem. The technique is asymptotically optimal as the number of subcarriers in every cell goes to infinity. However, this may not be true for finite number of carriers. Insummary, all these approaches are sub-optimal and no criteria are used to calibrate their performance gap with respect to the DRAFT March 19, 2018