Energy-efficient power allocation with QoS provisioning in OFDMA femtocell networks

This paper addresses the energy-efficient power allocation problem of downlink transmission with delay quality of service (QoS) constraint in the femtocell networks. Particularly, in order to provide statistical delay guarantee, the effective capacity (EC) is employed as the network performance measure instead of the conventional Shannon capacity. As a result, the energy efficiency (EE) metric of the femtocell is defined to be the total-EC-to-the-overall-power-consumption ratio of the femtocell base station (FBS). The optimization problem is firstly modeled as a supermodular game. Then the existence and characteristics of the Nash Equilibrium (NE) are investigated. A distributed energy-efficient power allocation algorithm is also designed to implement the game. Simulation results demonstrate that, our proposed algorithm delivers substantial energy efficiency improvement while satisfying a wide range of delay requirements.