Energy efficiency optimization in multi-user cellular systems with radio resource constraints

Energy efficiency has currently become one of the central issues in today's wireless communication industry. In this paper, we focus on the optimal energy efficiency in a multiuser cellular system and investigate its achievable upper bound from the perspective of radio resource available. Particularly, an optimization problem is formulated concerning radio resource scheduling, and an analytical optimal solution is obtained via mathematical analysis. Furthermore, an energy-efficient radio resource scheduling (EE-RRS) algorithm is proposed for numerical applications. Simulation results show that our proposed EE-RRS algorithm can realize significant improvements on energy efficiency with the optimal solution, and there is always a tradeoff between energy efficiency and transmission capacity.

I. Introduction

Enormous energy has been consumed by wireless communication industry in recent years, which results in global concerns on how to improve the energy efficiency of cellular mobile systems. To effectively improve the energy efficiency of a cellular system, most attention should be paid on the radio access network [1], since it can account for 80%+ of the total energy consumed by the whole system [2]–[3]. In the light of the essential contradiction between limited radio resource and wireless transmission capacity, improving the energy efficiency in radio access network becomes even more significant and challenging, as transmission power has always been a valuable radio resource.