On Power and Load Coupling in Cellular Networks for Energy Optimization

We consider the problem of minimization of sum transmission energy in cellular networks where coupling occurs between cells due to mutual interference. The coupling relation is characterized by the signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) coupling model. Both cell load and transmission power, where cell load measures the average level of resource usage in the cell, interact via the coupling model. The coupling is implicitly characterized with load and power as the variables of interest using two equivalent equations, namely, non-linear load coupling equation (NLCE) and non-linear power coupling equation (NPCE), respectively. By analyzing the NLCE and NPCE, we prove that operating at full load is optimal in minimizing sum energy, and provide an iterative power adjustment algorithm to obtain the corresponding optimal power solution with guaranteed convergence, where in each iteration a standard bisection search is employed. To obtain the algorithmic result, we use the properties of the so-called standard interference function; the proof is non-standard because the NPCE cannot even be expressed as a closed-form expression with power as the implicit variable of interest. We present numerical results illustrating the theoretical findings for a real-life and large-scale cellular network, showing the advantage of our solution compared to the conventional solution of deploying uniform power for base stations.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Energy-Aware Wireless Relay Selection in Load-Coupled OFDMA Cellular Networks

We investigate transmission energy minimization via optimizing wireless relay selection in orthogonal-frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. We take into account the impact of the load of cells on transmission energy. We prove the NP-hardness of the energy-aware wireless relay selection problem. To tackle the computational complexity, a partial optimality condition is derived for providing insights in respect of designing an effective and efficient algorithm. Numerical results show that the resulting algorithm achieves high energy performance.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

The role of asymptotic functions in network optimization and feasibility studies

Solutions to network optimization problems have greatly benefited from developments in nonlinear analysis, and, in particular, from developments in convex optimization. A key concept that has made convex and nonconvex analysis an important tool in science and engineering is the notion of asymptotic function, which is often hidden in many influential studies on nonlinear analysis and related fields. Therefore, we can also expect that asymptotic functions are deeply connected to many results in the wireless domain, even though they are rarely mentioned in the wireless literature. In this study, we show connections of this type. By doing so, we explain many properties of centralized and distributed solutions to wireless resource allocation problems within a unified framework, and we also generalize and unify existing approaches to feasibility analysis of network designs. In particular, we show sufficient and necessary conditions for mappings widely used in wireless communication problems (more precisely, the class of standard interference mappings) to have a fixed point. Furthermore, we derive fundamental bounds on the utility and the energy efficiency that can be achieved by solving a large family of max-min utility optimization problems in wireless networks.Comment: GlobalSIP 2017 (to appear

Spectral radii of asymptotic mappings and the convergence speed of the standard fixed point algorithm

Important problems in wireless networks can often be solved by computing fixed points of standard or contractive interference mappings, and the conventional fixed point algorithm is widely used for this purpose. Knowing that the mapping used in the algorithm is not only standard but also contractive (or only contractive) is valuable information because we obtain a guarantee of geometric convergence rate, and the rate is related to a property of the mapping called modulus of contraction. To date, contractive mappings and their moduli of contraction have been identified with case-by-case approaches that can be difficult to generalize. To address this limitation of existing approaches, we show in this study that the spectral radii of asymptotic mappings can be used to identify an important subclass of contractive mappings and also to estimate their moduli of contraction. In addition, if the fixed point algorithm is applied to compute fixed points of positive concave mappings, we show that the spectral radii of asymptotic mappings provide us with simple lower bounds for the estimation error of the iterates. An immediate application of this result proves that a known algorithm for load estimation in wireless networks becomes slower with increasing traffic.Comment: Paper accepted for presentation at ICASSP 201

Improving Resource Efficiency with Partial Resource Muting for Future Wireless Networks

We propose novel resource allocation algorithms that have the objective of finding a good tradeoff between resource reuse and interference avoidance in wireless networks. To this end, we first study properties of functions that relate the resource budget available to network elements to the optimal utility and to the optimal resource efficiency obtained by solving max-min utility optimization problems. From the asymptotic behavior of these functions, we obtain a transition point that indicates whether a network is operating in an efficient noise-limited regime or in an inefficient interference-limited regime for a given resource budget. For networks operating in the inefficient regime, we propose a novel partial resource muting scheme to improve the efficiency of the resource utilization. The framework is very general. It can be applied not only to the downlink of 4G networks, but also to 5G networks equipped with flexible duplex mechanisms. Numerical results show significant performance gains of the proposed scheme compared to the solution to the max-min utility optimization problem with full frequency reuse.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, to appear in WiMob 201