Energy-efficient opportunistic scheduling schemes in wireless networks

Exploiting the multiuser diversity in wireless networks has a fundamental tradeoff between throughput and energy saving. To balance the tradeoff, we reconsider the opportunistic scheduling in the aspect of energy saving, and propose a new energy-efficient opportunistic (EEFO) scheduling. Our goal is to maximize the performance of bits per energy unit under the constraint of fair resource allocation, and EEFO scheduling achieves it by controlling the number of users participating in the channel feedback. Through simulations, we show that EEFO scheduling is able to transmit significantly more amount of traffic compared to the competitive schemes under the given energy constraint. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.