Energy-efficient cooperative beamforming in clustered wireless networks

Recently, due to the growing concern over the ever-increasing energy consumption, much attention has been given to the energy-efficient design of wireless communication systems. Various strategies for improving the energy efficiency, which is defined as the transmitted bits per total energy consumed (in bits/Joule), have been proposed. In this paper, we analyze the energy efficiency of clustered cooperative beamforming where distributed relay nodes construct a virtual Multiple-Input Single-Output beamforming system with a maximum transmit power constraint, and compare its performance with that of direct communications. All the energy consumption overheads incurred are taken into account in the energy efficiency analysis assuming a constant circuit-power consumption model. We then study the number of relay nodes that maximizes the efficiency for a given outage constraint. In addition, we propose a mode switching algorithm which optimally chooses between using cooperative beamforming or direct communications for transmission. We show that cooperative beamforming significantly outperforms direct communications in energy efficiency, as well as in spectral efficiency, even though a much larger amount of circuit power is consumed.