Energy-Efficient Joint Power and Rate Control via Pricing in Wireless Data Networks

Next Generation wireless networks are evolving towards all-data system which are expected to support a variety of application services with diverse transmission rates. Meanwhile, since most of the mobile terminals in wireless networks are battery-powered, to use energy efficiently, each terminal needs to transmit just enough power to achieve the desired transmission rate without causing excessive interference in the network. In this paper, a game-theoretic framework is used to study the joint power and rate control problem on the energy efficiency of wireless data network. A energy-efficient non-cooperative joint power and rate control game is thus introduced in which each user seeks to choose its possible transmit power and transmission rate in order to maximize its own utility while satisfying its target SINR as quality-of service (QoS) requirement. The utility function here we adopt is especially suitable for energy-constrained networks. We introduce pricing of transmit power into the utility function which not only improves the overall system performance, but also obtains Pareto Improvement when compared to the game with no pricing. The existence, uniqueness, best-response strategies and Pareto efficiency of Nash Equilibrium for the proposed game are proved. Based on these analysis, we present a distributive joint power and rate control algorithm. In the simulation part, we investigate the best pricing factor and compare our proposed algorithm with alternative algorithms developed by using game theory.