Throughput Maximization With Rate-Dependent Power Consumption in Battery-Limited Multiuser Networks

This article proposes beamforming strategies for multiuser communication networks by jointly considering the data rate and battery lifetime of each user. We consider a practical power consumption model, where the decoding power of each user device is a nonlinear function of the data rate. We assume each user device is powered by a battery with limited capacity. The power consumption of the user device determines the expected battery lifetime which conforms to Peukert's law. Two non-convex optimization problems are considered based on two criteria: maximizing the minimum of user throughputs (MaxMin) and maximizing the weighted sum of user throughputs (MaxSum), during the battery lifetime. For the MaxMin problem, we solve it by using a bisection search algorithm. For the MaxSum problem, we propose an algorithm based on the successive convex approximation, which can find a stable point that approximates the optimum solution. Numerical simulations verify that the expected data throughput of the multiuser system can be greatly improved by properly choosing the beamforming strategies using the proposed algorithms.