A General Approach Toward Green Resource Allocation in Relay-Assisted Multiuser Communication Networks

The rapid growth of energy consumption due to the strong demands of wireless multimedia services, has become a major concern from the environmental perspective. In this paper, we investigate a novel energy-efficient resource allocation scheme for relay-assisted multiuser networks to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the network by jointly optimizing the subcarrier pairing permutation formed in one-to-many/many-to-one manner, subcarrier allocation, as well as the power allocation altogether. By analyzing the properties of the complex mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, which is generally very difficult to solve in its original form, we transform the problem into an equivalent convex problem by relaxing the integer variables using the concept of subcarrier time sharing, and by applying a successive convex approximation approach. Based on the dual decomposition method, we derive an optimal solution to the joint optimization problem. The impact of different network parameters, namely number of subcarriers and number of users, on the attainable EE and spectral efficiency (SE) performance of the proposed design framework is also investigated. The numerical results are provided to validate the theoretical findings and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for achieving higher EE and SE than the existing schemes.