Balancing Energy Efficiency and User Rate Fairness in Multicell Networks

In this paper, we consider the balance between the energy efficiency (EE) and the short-term fairness among individual users in a muiticell MISO downlink. Firstly, the power consumption and sum proportional rate are utilized jointly to construct an objective function. Then a transmit beamformer optimization problem for the objective maximization subject to transmit power constraints is formulated and challenging. To tackle this intricate problem, it is transferred to an approximate convex problem. A central iterative algorithm is proposed that converge to a local optimum of the primal problem. Furthermore, to avoid the high computational burden, an alternative distributed algorithm is proposed inspired by the relation between the weighted mean square error and the user rate. The numerical results show that the two algorithms have the nearly-identical performance and achieve a good balance between EE and the rate fairness.