Distributed assignment and resource allocation for energy efficiency in MIMO wireless networks

This paper deals with the problem of distributed resource allocation in multi-carrier MIMO networks, for energy efficiency maximization. The user-subcarrier assignment is jointly allocated together with the users' transmit powers, subject to the constraint that each subcarrier can be used by only one user. To this end, a novel approach is proposed which merges the popular Dinkelbach's algorithm with the framework of distributed auction theory. The resulting algorithm can be implemented in a distributed fashion, with very limited feedback overhead, and is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum of the system energy efficiency, within a predefined threshold which can be chosen arbitrarily small. Numerical results compare the proposed distributed algorithm to the optimal, centralized allocation, showing its merits both in terms of performance and computational complexity.