Methods and apparatus are disclosed for scheduling sub-carriers in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communication system. In an exemplary method, channel quality metric values for each of a plurality of sub-channels are determined, in view of a selected mobile terminal. For each of two or more threshold levels for the channel quality metric, sub-carrier groups composed of sub-carriers corresponding to sub-channels having channel quality metric values superior to the threshold level are identified, and an estimated data throughput is calculated for each of the identified sub-carrier groups. One or more of the identified sub-carrier groups is allocated to the selected mobile terminal according to the estimated data throughputs.