Active-mode power optimization in OFDMA-based wireless networks

Energy efficiency is increasingly important for wireless cellular systems due to the limited battery resources of mobile clients. While modern cellular standards emphasize low client battery consumption, existing techniques do not explicitly focus on reducing power that is consumed when a client is actively communicating with the network. Based on high data rate demands of modern multimedia applications, active-mode power consumption should also be an important consideration for wireless system design and standards development. Recent work in this area shows that radio resource management schemes optimizing energy efficient metrics can provide considerable reduction in client power consumption. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of such techniques using realistic cellular system simulation model. Specifically, we focus on the emerging fourth generation IEEE 802.16m standard. Our simulation results indicate that energy efficient techniques continue to provide considerable power savings, even when accounting for realistic system parameters and channel environments.