Energy efficient resource allocation in wireless systems with control channel overhead

Abstract

This paper presents a novel resource scheduling technique named Time Compression Mode (TCoM) that allows energy aware schedulers to decrease the energy consumption within orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) type systems - for example the Long Term Evolution (LTE) system. TCoM allows users whose energy consumption is dominated by control channel overhead, to reduce their overall energy expenditure by reducing the number of resource blocks (RBs) allocated to them. This leads to an overall reduction in the used energy due to the decrease in energy used for overhead transmission. To ensure correct operation, TCoM has to be coupled with an energy aware scheduler. This combination not only reduces the used energy, but is also able to increase the achieved user data rate. Simulation results show that the data rate performance is equivalent for 86.8% of the users, however the remaining 13.2% enjoy approximately double the data rate delivered by the benchmark. The overall used energy is decreased by 26% on average. These results are achieved for an future base station (BS) overall hardware efficiency model.