Energy-Efficient Subcarrier Assignment and Power Allocation in OFDMA Systems With Max-Min Fairness Guarantees

In next-generation wireless networks, energy efficiency optimization needs to take individual link fairness into account. In this paper, we investigate a max-min energy efficiency-optimal problem (MEP) to ensure fairness among links in terms of energy efficiency in OFDMA systems. In particular, we maximize the energy efficiency of the worst-case link subject to the rate requirements, transmit power, and subcarrier assignment constraints. Due to the nonsmooth and mixed combinatorial features of the formulation, we focus on low-complexity suboptimal algorithms design. Using a generalized fractional programming theory and the Lagrangian dual decomposition, we first propose an iterative algorithm to solve the problem. We then devise algorithms to separate the subcarrier assignment and power allocation to further reduce the computational cost. Our simulation results verify the convergence performance and the fairness achieved among links, and particularly reveal a new tradeoff between the network energy efficiency and fairness by comparing the MEP with the existing algorithms.