Energy Efficient Subcarrier-Power Allocation and Relay Selection Scheme for OFDMA-Based Cooperative Relay Networks

Uplink energy efficient communication is an important issue due to the limited battery power for Mobile Stations (MSs). In this paper, the average ´Bits-per-Joule´ is defined as the energy efficiency metric, and the optimal joint power allocation for both MS and RS is derived for maximizing MS´ energy efficiency. Based on that, we developed a low-complexity subcarrier-power allocation and relay selection scheme for maximizing energy efficiency per user in an OFDMA cooperative relay network, assuming full channel state information (CSI) is available at both relay nodes and BS nodes. The numerical result demonstrates that the energy efficiency performance of cooperative relay networks can be better in the range of 15% to 30% as compared to that of single BS networks. It also shows our proposed scheme has significant improvement on the energy efficiency performance as compared with conventional max-throughput and fairness-based EPA schemes. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can achieve similar performance in much lower computational complexity as compared with the exhaustive search scheme.