Modeling and minimization of transceiver power consumption in wireless networks

The minimization of the overall power consumption of wireless networks while satisfying a certain throughput and error rate constraint is investigated. The total power dissipation includes the radiated power as well as the circuit power consumption. In the context of battery operated short range communication, where low power, low cost and small size are key requirements (e.g. standard IEEE 802.15.4), this circuit aware system optimization is crucial given the growing importance of “Green Communication”. In fact, the power dissipation of certain analog and digital components along the signal path reaches values in the order of or is even higher than the transmit power in such applications. Using an appropriate information-theoretic framework and a simplified wireless network model, we derive the optimal frequency reuse distance, the optimal bit-resolution of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC), the optimal choice of the noise figure for the low noise amplifier (LNA), the optimal operating input back-off (IBO) of the power amplifier (PA), as well as the optimum decoding (DEC) strategy as a function of the path-loss (i.e. the communication distance), that guarantee a certain area spectral efficiency ρ under a certain error probability P_e. This work is an extension to the work [1], [2], [3], where a noisy single user channel was assumed.