Low-complexity energy-efficient resource allocation in OFDMA networks

Energy efficiency (EE) is one fundamental performance metric for design of orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks besides spectral efficiency (SE). The conventional resource allocation is to maximize data throughput without consideration of EE. In this paper, we propose a new low-complexity resource allocation algorithm to maximize EE, which first meet the quality-of-services (QoS) demand of every user and then assign the rest of subcarriers with criterion of energy efficiency. We also compare this new algorithm with the near-optimal EE algorithm, maximum-power-decrease-first (MPDF), which is proposed in [9]. The proposed algorithm differs from the MPDF algorithm in terms of the number of waterfilling for subcarrier allocation. The waterfilling operation in our proposed algorithm is not related to the number of users so that it reduces the computational complexity significantly. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm approach the EE performance of the MPDF algorithm with lower complexity.