Energy-efficient downlink resource allocation for mobile devices in wireless systems

Mobile users have become increasingly addicted to multimedia applications which are extremely downlink-intensive. We observed that conventional objectives, like rate adaptive and margin adaptive, adopted for radio resource allocation may lead to unnecessary energy consumption of mobile devices, which is adverse to the development of mobile multimedia applications. This paper presents an alternative objective, called energy adaptive, and formulates the energy-efficient downlink resource allocation problem. The objective is to minimize the total energy consumption of mobile devices for data reception while satisfying users' data rate requirements and base station's available transmit power. We prove that the target problem is NP-hard and propose an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. The results of simulations conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm agree with our observation on the conventional objectives, as well as providing some useful insights into the design of energy-efficient downlink resource allocation for wireless systems.