Power Allocation for Energy Efficiency Maximization in Massive MIMO Systems

In this work, we investigate the power allocation needed to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of a massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system. We first derive a closed-form expression for the user rate with the presence of pilot contamination caused by inter-cell interference during the channel estimation phase. From the definition of system EE, we propose a maximization problem with two constraints: limited power for pilot and data signals and a minimum value for every user rate. The proposed maximization problem is a fractional programming problem and is very hard to solve directly. Therefore, we propose the first iterative algorithm to transform the original problem into subtractive form. Moreover, we propose the second iterative algorithm to solve the subtractive form maximization problem by approximating it as a convex problem. The convergence and feasibility of the two proposed algorithms are also discussed. Finally, the effectiveness of our scheme is shown by simulation results.