Energy efficient power control and beamforming in multi-antenna enabled femtocells

Energy efficient beamforming and power control problem is considered for a MISO (multiple input single output) network. We consider an active femtocell within the coverage area of a macrocell. The femto base station is equipped with multi antennas and the users are considered to be single antenna users. A beamforming and power control problem is formulated in order to minimize the energy consumption per bit in the downlink transmission in the femtocell. The objective function is introduced as “sum power/sum rate” which has the unit J/bit to measure the energy efficiency of the network. The problem is non-convex. We introduce a novel method to solve this problem with an approximation. We show that the problem can be solved with convex optimization techniques which has more practical interest even though the solution is suboptimal. In order to measure the energy efficiency we apply an existing power model which considers the total energy consumption of a base station. Thus we expect that our solution indicates realistic energy consumption measurements. Then we introduce a beamforming and power control algorithm which minimizes the energy consumption per bit transmission. Finally, the behavior of the objective function is observed in different antenna configurations by varying the user density in different channel environments.