Hardware and Physical Layer Adaptation for a Power Constrained MIMO OFDM System

We propose an approach for minimizing the total power consumed by a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing communication system. The system under consideration supports a wide range of communication scenarios over a flat fading channel. A communication scenario is defined by throughput requirement, transmission distance, and maximum packet error rate (PER) constraints. Power consumption minimization is achieved by the joint configuration of hardware and physical layer system parameters according to the communication scenario. The configurable parameters are the modulation and coding scheme, antenna configuration, operating bandwidth, power amplifier back-off, analog-to-digital converter resolution, phase-locked loop phase noise power, transmission power, and transmit duty cycle. The optimal parameter configuration is found through a brute-force search over a simulation-based database linking performance with power consumption. Results show that power consumption can be reduced by a factor of 24.6 for a single-input single-output system and 3.79 for a MIMO system at a PER of 10%.