Weighted average energy efficiency contours for uplink channels

The continuous increase in the energy consumption of wireless networks has led to extensive research and development into energy-efficient communications. Towards this objective, this paper employs a novel technique for maximizing the energy efficiency (EE) of wireless networks, using weighted average EE contours with multiple decoding policies (DPs), where users are prioritized based on different criteria such as channel condition. Moreover, our EE based resource allocation method is extended such that other system targets such as rate-fairness and quality of service (QoS) are satisfied. Results indicate that our EE-based resource allocation scheme achieves the highest EE when DP 2 is employed, i.e. the user with the best channel gain achieves its single user bound, whilst other users experience residual interference. Moreover, both the fairness and QoS constraints increase user satisfaction, in terms of achievable data rate, which comes at the cost of a higher transmit power, and therefore lower EE.