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Energy-efficient design in wireless communications networks

The widespread application of wireless services and the requirements of ubiquitous access have recently triggered rapidly booming energy consumption in wireless communications networks. Such escalation of energy consumption in wireless networks causes high operational expenditure from electricity bills for operators, unsatisfactory user experience due to limited battery capacity of wireless devices, and a large amount of greenhouse gas emission. Green radio (GR), which emphasizes both energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE), has been proposed as an effective solution and is becoming the mainstream for future wireless network design. Unfortunately, EE and SE do not always coincide and may even sometimes conflict. In this dissertation, we focus on energy-efficient transmission and resource allocation techniques for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks and the joint energy-efficient design of OFDMA and other promising wireless communications techniques, such as cognitive radio (CR) and two-way relay.

Firstly, we investigate the principles of energy-efficient design for pure OFDMA networks. As the first step, we study the fundamental interrelationship between EE and SE in downlink OFDMA networks and analyze the impacts of channel gain and circuit power on the EE-SE relationship. We establish a general EE-SE optimization framework, where the overall EE, SE and per-user
quality-of-service (QoS) are all considered. Under this framework, we find that EE is quasiconcave in SE and decreases with SE when SE is large enough. These findings are very helpful guidelines for designing energy- and spectral-efficient OFDMA. To facilitate the application of energy-efficient resource allocation, we then investigate the energy-efficient resource allocation in both downlink and uplink OFDMA networks. For the downlink transmission, the generalized EE is maximized while for the uplink case the minimum individual EE is
maximized, both under prescribed per-user minimum data rate requirements. For both transmission scenarios, we first provide the optimal solution and then develop an computationally efficient suboptimal approach by exploring the inherent structure and property of the energy-efficient design. Then we study energy-efficient design in downlink OFDMA networks with effective capacity-based delay provisioning for delay-sensitive traffic. By integrating information theory with the concept of effective capacity, we formulate and solve an EE optimization problem with statistical delay provisioning. We also analyze the tradeoff between EE and delay, the relationship between spectral-efficient and energy-efficient designs, and the impact of system parameters, including circuit power and delay exponents, on the overall performance.

Secondly, we consider joint energy-efficient design of OFDMA and CR and two-way relay, respectively, to further enhance the EE and SE of wireless networks. We study energy-efficient opportunistic spectrum access strategies for an OFDMA-based CR network with multiple secondary users (SUs). Both worst EE and average EE of the SUs are considered and optimized subject to constraints including maximum transmit power and maximum interference to primary user (PU) system. For both cases, we first find the optimal solution and then propose a low-complexity suboptimal alternative. The results show that the energy-efficient CR strategies significantly boost EE compared with the conventional spectral-efficient CR ones while the low-complexity suboptimal approaches can well balance the performance and complexity. Then we study energy-efficient resource allocation for OFDMA-based two-way relay, which aims at maximizing the aggregated EE utility while provisioning proportional fairness in EE among different terminal pairs. Different from most exist energy-efficient design, we consider a new circuit power model, where the dynamic circuit power is proportional to the number of active subcarrier. For low-complexity solution, we propose an EE-oriented sequential subchannel assignment policy and discover the sufficient condition for early termination of the sequential subchannel assignment without losing the EE optimality. It is found that the energy-efficient transmission does not necessarily make all the subcarriers active, which is another useful principle for practical energy-efficient system design.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/52217
Date27 August 2014
CreatorsXiong, Cong
ContributorsLi, Geoffrey Y.
PublisherGeorgia Institute of Technology
Source SetsGeorgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
Formatapplication/pdf

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