Energy-efficient uplink multi-user MIMO with dynamic antenna management

Energy efficiency is important for mobile devices because battery technology development has not kept up with the growing demand of ubiquitous broadband communications. This paper addresses optimal energy-efficient design for uplink (UL) MU-MIMO in a single cell environment. We assume mobile devices have dynamic antenna management capability and can turn off circuit operations when some antennas are not used to save power. We show that some antennas should not be used even when their channel states are good because turning them on consumes too much circuit power. This indicates a single antenna system could perform better than a multi-antenna system in terms of energy efficiency. Based on theoretical analysis, we further develop low-complexity yet globally optimal algorithms that converge to the optimum exponentially.