In this paper, a novel resource allocation (RA) strategy is designed for the downlink of orthogonal frequency division multiple access networks employing practical modulation and coding under quality of service constraints and retransmission techniques. Compared with previous works, two basic concepts are combined together, namely: 1) taking the goodput (GP) as performance metric and 2) ensuring maximum fairness among users. Thus, the resulting RA maximizes the GP of the worst users, optimizing subcarrier allocation (SA), per-subcarrier power allocation (PA), and adaptation of modulation and coding (AMC) of the active users, yielding a nonlinear nonconvex mixed optimization problem (OP). The intrinsic demanding difficulty of the OP is tackled by iteratively and optimally solving the AMC, PA, and SA subproblems, devoting special care to the difficult nonlinear combinatorial SA-OP. First, the optimal (yet computationally complex) solution is found by applying the branch and bound method to the optimal SA solution found in the relaxed domain, and accordingly, it is taken as benchmark. Then, an innovative suboptimal yet efficient solution based on the metaheuristic ant colony optimization (ACO) framework is derived. The proposed RA strategy is corroborated by comprehensive simulations, showing improved performance even at the cost of affordable numerical complexity.