Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for OFDMA Heterogeneous Networks

We proposed several energy-efficient resource allocation algorithms for the downlink of an orthogonal frequency-division-multiple-access (OFDMA) based femtocell heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Heterogeneous QoS and fairness in rate are investigated in the proposed resource allocation problem. A dense deployment of femtocells in the coverage area of a central macrocell is considered and energy usage of both femtocell and macrocell users are optimized simultaneously. We aim to maximize the weighted sum of the individual energy efficiencies (WSEEMax) and the network energy efficiency (NEEMax) while satisfying the following: (1) minimum throughput for delay-sensitive (DS) users, (2) fairness constraint for delay-tolerant (DT) users, (3) required constraints of OFDMA systems. The problem is formulated in three different forms: mixed 0-1 integer programming formulation, time-sharing formulation and sparsity-inducing formulation. The proposed resource block (RB) and power optimization problems are combinatorial and highly non-convex due to the fractional form of the objective function, the integer constraint of OFDMA RBs and non-affine fairness. We adopt the successive convex approximation (SCA) approach and transform the problems into a sequence of convex subproblems. With the proposed algorithms, we show that the overall joint RB and power allocation schemes converge to suboptimal solutions. Numerical examples confirm the merits of the proposed algorithms.