Average Energy Efficiency Contours for Single Carrier AWGN MAC

Energy efficiency has become increasingly important in wireless communications, with significant environmental and financial benefits. This paper studies the achievable capacity region of a single carrier uplink channel consisting of two transmitters and a single receiver, and uses average energy efficiency contours to find the optimal rate pair based on four different targets: Maximum energy efficiency, a trade-off between maximum energy efficiency and rate fairness, achieving energy efficiency target with maximum sum-rate and achieving energy efficiency target with fairness. In addition to the transmit power, circuit power is also accounted for, with the maximum transmit power constrained to a fixed value. Simulation results demonstrate the achievability of the optimal energy-efficient rate pair within the capacity region, and provide the trade-off for energy efficiency, fairness and maximum sum-rate.