Trade-Off between Spectral Efficiency and Energy Efficiency in Multi-Cell Uplink Networks

In this paper, we investigate the effect of user scheduling and transmit power control on trade-off between spectral efficiency and energy efficiency in multi-cell uplink networks. We assume that each user adaptively controls the transmit power according to its generating interference to other cell base stations (BSs) and each BS schedules the user having the largest effective channel gain among users in a cell. The users transmit data with the peak power, P (MAX), if the generating interference to other cell BSs is smaller than a particular threshold, P (MAX). With the joint interference-aware power control (IAPC) and user scheduling, the trade-off between spectral efficiency and energy efficiency becomes significantly improved as the number of users in each cell increased, compared with the conventional maximum signal-to-noise ratio (maxSNR) user scheduling and minimum interference-to-noise ratio (minINR) user scheduling. In addition, the power consumption becomes significantly reduced with the IAPC and user scheduling for a given spectral efficiency.