Electromagnetic Emission-Aware Scheduling for the Uplink of Multicell OFDM Wireless Systems

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. Given that wireless communication systems rely on radiofrequency waves, the electromagnetic (EM) emissions from these systems are increasingly becoming a concern, especially in terms of adverse health effects. In order to address these concerns, we propose a novel resource allocation scheme for minimizing the EM emission of users in the uplink of multicell orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, while ensuring the quality of service. Our scheme is based on the assumption that long-term channel state information of all the users in the network is available. A new multicell user grouping that uses the received interference powers of the users of different sectors is proposed. Furthermore, we propose two power allocation algorithms to minimize EM emission. The first power allocation algorithm performs multicell iterative optimization to obtain the transmit powers of each user in the system. On the other hand, our second power allocation algorithm uses the average channel gains of the users of different sectors to obtain an approximation of the transmit power of each user without multicell iterative optimization. As a result, this approach has a reduced complexity when compared to our first power allocation algorithm. Simulation results show that our scheme reduces EM emission by up to 70% when compared to a single-cell EM emission aware scheme and by over 3 to 4 orders of magnitude when compared to spectral efficiency maximization schemes.