Energy-Efficient Antenna Selection and Power Allocation for Large-Scale Multiple Antenna Systems with Hybrid Energy Supply

The combination of energy harvesting and large-scale multiple antenna technologies provides a promising solution for improving the energy efficiency (EE) by exploiting renewable energy sources and reducing the transmission power per user and per antenna. However, the introduction of energy harvesting capabilities into large-scale multiple antenna systems poses many new challenges for energy-efficient system design due to the intermittent characteristics of renewable energy sources and limited battery capacity. Furthermore, the total manufacture cost and the sum power of a large number of radio frequency (RF) chains can not be ignored, and it would be impractical to use all the antennas for transmission. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient antenna selection and power allocation algorithm to maximize the EE subject to the constraint of user's quality of service (QoS). An iterative offline optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the non-convex EE optimization problem by exploiting the properties of nonlinear fractional programming. The relationships among maximum EE, selected antenna number, battery capacity, and EE-SE tradeoff are analyzed and verified through computer simulations.Comment: IEEE Globecom 2014 Selected Areas in Communications Symposium-Green Communications and Computing Trac

Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected. Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services. Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs. Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications, conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage, and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and atmosphere conditions, are also discussed