Joint Power and Bandwidth Allocation for Energy-Efficient Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

This paper investigates the problem of energy efficiency maximization (EEM) for the small cells that coexist with a macro cell in an underlay heterogeneous cellular network, where a macro base station and a number of small base stations transmit signals to a macro user and small users through their shared spectrum. We propose a joint power and bandwidth allocation (JPBA) scheme for the sake of maximizing the energy efficiency (EE) of small cells under the constraint of a guaranteed quality-of-service requirement for the macro cell. Considering that our formulated EEM-based JPBA (EEM-JPBA) problem is non-convex, we convert the original fractional problem into an equivalent subtractive form by adopting the Dinkelbach's method, which is addressed through the augmented Lagrange multiplier approach. Moreover, a new two-tier iterative algorithm is presented to obtain the optimal solution of our EEM-JPBA scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed two-tier iterative algorithm can quickly converge to the optimal EE solution. In addition, it is shown that the proposed EEM-JPBA scheme significantly outperforms the conventional power and bandwidth allocation methods in terms of their EE performance.