Quantifying and Comparing Energy Efficiencies on SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO Downlinks

This paper evaluates and compares the performance of single- user (SU) and multi-user (MU) transmission for downlink multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in terms of system energy efficiency (EE). We introduce power control algorithms to maximize EE. Specifically, to optimize the power allocation, we consider the problem of EE maximization with the satisfaction of the minimum spectral efficiency (SE) gain. Antenna selection is taken into account to further enhance the EE performance for both SU and MU systems. Our results reveal that we should turn off extra antennas at the transmitter, which are originally used for diversity gain but incur large circuit power consumption. Our comparisons between SU and MU differ from conventional comparisons, which focus on SE. Jointly considering EE and SE, we show that SU is more desirable when the transmit power is low, while MU is favored in the case of high transmit power.