Energy Efficiency-Aware Joint Resource Allocation and Power Allocation in Multi-User Beamforming

As a conventional metric, spectrum efficiency has been investigated widely in communication systems due to the limited bandwidth resources and increasing subscriber density. Beamforming technology is used in TD-LTE-A and 5G downlink to improve the spectrum efficiency and system capacity, and a proper resource allocation algorithm can also be used to improve the spectrum efficiency on the premise of satisfying user equipment (UE) requirements. In recent years, energy efficiency has attracted more and more attention as the power consumption on the communication systems increases rapidly, which lays a heavy burden on the environment. In this paper, we propose a joint resource allocation and power allocation algorithm in multi-user beamforming mode, which aims at maximizing the energy efficiency, and also takes UE requirements and spectrum efficiency into consideration. The proposed algorithm first calculates the user priorities and gives a UE grouping method to allocate resource blocks (RBs) to different UEs under the assumption that the power is equally allocated among UEs on the same RB. After that, on each RB, it calculates the power allocation among different UEs to realize the improvement of energy efficiency. In addition, the satisfaction of UE requirements is added in the algorithm as a constraint. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shows an excellent performance on system capacity, i.e., spectrum efficiency, and also provides higher energy efficiency than existing algorithms. Moreover, the UE requirements can be better satisfied and system fairness can also be improved.