Electromagnetic Emission-Aware Schedulers for the Uplink of OFDM Wireless Communication Systems

The popularity and convergence of wireless communications have resulted in continuous network upgrades to support the increasing demand for bandwidth. However, given that wireless communication systems operate on radio-frequency waves, the health effects of electromagnetic (EM) emission from these systems are increasingly becoming a concern due to the ubiquity of mobile communication devices. To address these concerns, we propose two schemes (offline and online) for minimizing the EM emission of users in the uplink of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, while maintaining an acceptable quality of service (QoS). We formulate our offline EM reduction scheme as a convex optimization problem and solve it through water filling. This is based on the assumption that the long-term channel state information (CSI) of all the users is known. Given that, in practice, long-term CSI of all the users cannot always be available, we propose our online EM emission reduction scheme, which is based on minimizing the instantaneous transmit energy per bit of each user. Simulation results show that both of our proposed schemes significantly minimize the EM emission when compared with the benchmark classic greedy spectral efficiency (SE)-based scheme and an energy efficiency (EE)-based scheme. Furthermore, our offline scheme proves to be very robust against channel prediction errors.