Power Allocation Criteria for Distributed Antenna Systems

In this paper, we discuss three different design criteria for a distributed antenna system (DAS). They include maximizing throughput under the constraint of the overall transmit power, minimizing the overall transmit power while guaranteeing the minimum spectral efficiency (SE) requirements, and maximizing energy efficiency (EE) under the constraints of minimum SE requirements and overall transmit power. The optimization problems for the first two criteria are signomial programming (SP) problems when considering the interference among the mobile stations (MSs), which are nonlinear nonconvex and do not lead to the closed-form solutions directly. Exploiting the nature of geometric mean, we transform the SP problems into geometric programming (GP) problems, which can be solved by turning them into convex problems. For the third criterion, using the theorem of fractional programming, we first transform the fractional optimization problem into an equivalent optimization problem in a subtractive form, which is an SP problem. We then obtain its solution by transforming the SP to the GP problem as we have done for the previous two problems. Based on these design criteria, three power allocation algorithms are developed for the downlink multiuser DAS. Depending on the application environments, we can use the first and second criteria to achieve the highest throughput and to save energy, respectively, while balancing throughput and energy consumption using the third criterion.