Dynamic energy saving subcarrier, bit and power allocation in OFDMA relay networks

To reduce energy consumption while maintaining users´ Quality of Service (QoS) in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Access (OFDMA) relay-enhanced networks, an adaptive energy saving subcarrier, bit and power allocation scheme is presented. The optimal subcarrier, bit and power allocation problems based on discrete adaptive modulation and coding scheme have been previously formulated for relay-enhanced networks, and have been reformulated into and solved by integer programming in optimization theory. If the system still has a surplus of subcarriers after resource allocation, we carry out Bandwidth Exchange (BE) to enable more subcarriers to participate in transmission to save energy. In addition, as the relay selection scheme is closely linked with resource allocation, a heuristic energy saving relay selection scheme is proposed. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm consumes less energy when transmitting the same number of bits than greedy energy saving schemes, although its spectrum efficiency is worse.