Electromagnetic emission-aware scheduling for the uplink of coordinated OFDM wireless systems

Abstract

The increasing demand for data and multimedia services, as well as the ubiquitous nature of the current generation of mobile devices have resulted in continuous network upgrades to support an ever-increasing number of users. However, given that wireless communication systems operate on radiofrequency waves, the health effects of electromagnetic (EM) emission from these systems are increasingly becoming a concern. In order to address these concerns, we propose in this paper, an EM emission reduction scheme for the uplink of OFDM wireless systems with base station coordination. We formulate the EM reduction scheme as a convex optimization problem and solve it by iteratively allocating bits to users on their respective subcarriers in each sector. This is based on the assumption that the scheduler can predict the channel state information of all the users for a given transmission window. Simulation results show that, with coordination, our proposed scheme reduces EM emission by over 85% and 99% when compared with a no frequency reuse scheme and an energy efficiency based scheme, respectively.