Optimal power allocation and AP deployment in green wireless cooperative communications

Recent advances in green energy technologies have boosted the deployment of green wireless communication networks. Unlike traditional energy sources, green energy, e.g., solar, wind, and hydro, etc, is sustainable and eco-friendly in nature. However, the capacity and availability of green energy highly depend on the weather and location, which may lead to violation of users´ Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we jointly consider the power allocation and access point (AP) placement problems in green wireless cooperative communication networks. Specifically, the network scenario includes several cooperative users served by an AP. The objective aims at maximizing the overall throughput by jointly allocating transmitting power and deploying the green APs, i.e., APs powered by green energy, subject to the harvested energy constraint. To this end, a closed form power allocation scheme and an AP placement metric are proposed. Our theoretical analysis shows that the overall throughput can be dramatically improved with our proposed scheme. Moreover, extensive simulation results demonstrate that our scheme approaches the optimal solution and significantly outperforms non-cooperative transmission under a variety of network scenarios.