Adaptive Energy-Efficient Power Allocation in Green Interference-Alignment-Based Wireless Networks

Interference alignment (IA) is a promising technique for interference management in wireless networks. However, the sum rate may fall short of the theoretical maximum, particularly at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels since IA mainly concentrates on mitigating the interference, instead of improving the quality of desired signal. Moreover, most of the previous works focused on improving spectrum efficiency, but the energy efficiency (EE) aspect is largely ignored. In this paper, an adaptive energy-efficient IA algorithm is proposed through power allocation (PA) and transmission-mode adaptation for green IA-based wireless networks. The PA problem for IA is first analyzed; then, we propose a PA scheme that optimizes the EE of IA-based wireless networks. When the SNR is low, the transmitted power of some users may become zero. Thus, the users with low transmitted power are turned into the sleep mode in our scheme to save energy. The transmitted power and transmission mode of the remaining active users are adapted again to further improve the EE of the network. To guarantee the interests of all the users, fairness among users is also considered in the proposed scheme. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in improving the EE of IA-based wireless networks.