A Utility-Based Joint Subcarrier and Power Allocation for Green Communications in Multi-User Two-Way Regenerative Relay Networks

In this paper, we investigate utility-based joint subcarrier and power allocation algorithms for improving the energy efficiency (EE) in multi-user two-way regenerative relay networks. With the objective of determining the best subcarrier allocation for each user pair, subcarrier pairing permutation, and power allocation to all the nodes, a network price is introduced to the power consumption as a penalty for the achievable sum rate, followed by the examination of its impact on the tradeoff between the EE and spectral efficiency. The formulated optimization problem is a non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, and thus a concave lower bound on the objective function and a series of convex transformations are applied to transform the problem into a convex one. Through dual decomposition, we propose a utility-based resource allocation algorithm for iteratively tightening the lower bound and finding the optimal solution of the primal problem. By exploring the structure of the obtained optimal solution, an optimal price that enables green resource allocation is found from the perspective of maximizing EE. Additionally, a suboptimal algorithm is investigated to strike a balance between computational complexity and optimality. Simulation results evince the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.