Subcarrier Allocation and Precoder Design for Energy Efficient MIMO-OFDMA Downlink Systems

This paper studies the subcarrier allocation and precoder design problem for downlink multiple-input-multiple-output-orthogonal frequency-division multiple access systems. The criterion is to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the system. We adopt the time-sharing concept to allocate each subcarrier to one user, which results in a criterion similar with that of rate maximization. However, this approach does not make it possible to solve the problem for any value of the transmit power. We found that there exist gaps along the direction of total transmit power when the user selection switches for each subcarrier, which leads to a discontinuous EE function, for which quasi-concavity has to be checked. We first show that the sufficient conditions obtained for the subcarrier allocation approach are the optimal ones among all possibilities with the same transmit power. Then, we show that the proposed subcarrier allocation results in a discontinuous and quasi-concave EE function. We also give an upper bound of the EE function when the proposed sufficient conditions are not met. Finally, we propose an algorithm to find the maximal EE and its performance is illustrated by means of numerical results.