Energy-Efficient OFDMA-Based Two-Way Relay

Energy-efficient orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) aims to relieve the booming energy consumption in wireless communications networks and has recently received lots of attention. Meanwhile, two-way relay has been extensively studied and proves to be more spectral-efficient than direct transmission and one-way relay in many scenarios. In this paper, we study energy-efficient resource allocation for OFDMA-based two-way relay, maximizing the aggregated energy efficiency (EE) utility while provisioning proportional fairness in EE among different terminal pairs. The energy-efficient joint power and subchannel allocation and active subchannel selection problem is mixed-integer combinatorial and further demonstrates to be nonconvex. To approach the performance limit, we first find an upper-bound solution relying on continuous relaxation and the Lagrange dual method. To reduce the computational complexity, we separate power allocation and subchannel assignment. To this regard, we exploit the hidden concavity and the pseudoconcavity in the subproblems for any fixed subchannel assignment and propose an EE-oriented sequential subchannel assignment policy. Besides, we discover the sufficient condition for early termination of the sequential subchannel assignment without losing the EE optimality. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed energy-efficient OFDMA-based two-way relay can achieve much larger EE utility while provisioning proportional fairness in EE among different terminal pairs compared to its spectral-efficient counterpart.