Energy efficient resource allocation in non-cooperative multi-cell OFDMA systems

A non-cooperative game is proposed to perform the sub-carrier assignment and power allocation for the multi-cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system. The objective is to raise the spectral efficiency of the system and prolong the life time of user nodes. This paper defines a game player as a cell formed by the unique base station and the served users. The utility function considered here measures the user's achieved utility per power. Each individual cell's goal is to maximize the total utility of its users. To search the Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game, an iterative and distributed algorithm is presented. Since the NE is inefficient, the pricing of user's transmission power is introduced to improve the NE in the Pareto sense. Simulation results show the proposed game outperforms the water-filling algorithm in terms of fairness and energy efficiency. Moreover, through employing a liner pricing function, the energy efficiency could be further improved.