Optimal Energy-Efficient Power Allocation for Distributed Antenna Systems With Imperfect CSI

In this paper, we study energy-efficient power allocation in distributed antenna systems (DASs). Unlike previous works that assumed perfect channel-state information (CSI) at the transmitter, we investigate a more practical case, where only the slowly varying large-scale CSI is known, to reduce the system overhead for CSI acquisition. Under a generalized DAS model, the power allocation problem for energy-efficiency (EE) maximization is formulated as a nonconvex fractional programming problem. Using the random matrix theory, the nonlinear fractional programming theory, and the saddle-point theory, we propose an iterative algorithm that achieves the global optimal solution. We also show that deploying the antennas in a distributed manner may enlarge the region where the optimal EE and the optimal spectral efficiency (SE) can be simultaneously achieved. Accordingly, we suggest the DAS-like way to densify the future 5G and beyond cellular networks to achieve EE and SE simultaneously.