Energy minimization resource allocation schemes for relay-enhanced OFDMA networks

This paper studies the problem of joint allocation of subchannel, transmission power, and phase duration in the relay-enhanced bidirectional orthogonal frequency-division multiple access time division duplex systems. The challenges of this resource allocation problem arise from the complication of multiple-phase assignments within a subchannel since the relay station can provide an additional signal path from the base station to the user equipments (UEs). Existing research work does not fully consider all the influential factors to achieve feasible resource allocation for the relay-based networks. Since energy consumption is one of the principal issues, the energy minimization resource allocation (EMRA) schemes are proposed in this paper to design the allocation of subchannel, power, and phase duration for the UEs with the consideration of UE’s quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Both the four-phase and two-phase bidirectional relaying assignments and the network coding technique are adopted to obtain the suboptimal solutions for the proposed EMRA schemes. Different weights are designed for the UEs to achieve the minimization of weighted system energy for the relay-enhanced networks. Simulation results show that the proposed EMRA schemes can provide comparably better energy conservation and outage performance with QoS support.