In this paper, we develop distributed approaches for power allocation and scheduling in wireless access networks. We consider a model where users communicate over a set of parallel multi-access fading channels, as in an OFDM or multi-carrier system. At each time, each user must decide which channels to transmit on and how to allocate its power over these channels. We give distributed power allocation and scheduling policies where each user?s actions depend only on knowledge of their own channel gains. We characterize an optimal policy which maximizes the system throughput and also give a simpler sub-optimal policy which is shown to have the optimal scaling behavior in several asymptotic regimes.