Improved Water-Filling Power Allocation for Energy-Efficient Massive MIMO Downlink Transmissions

Abstract

Energy Efficiency (EE) is becoming increasingly important for wireless communications and has caught more attention due to steadily rising energy costs and environmental concerns. Recently, a new network architecture known as Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) has been proposed with the remarkable potential to achieve huge gains in EE with simple linear processing. In this paper, a power allocation algorithm is proposed for EE to achieve the optimal EE in Massive MIMO. Based on the simplified expression, we develop a new algorithm to compute the optimal power allocation algorithm and it has been compared with the existing scheme from the previous literature. An improved water filling algorithm is proposed and embedded in the power allocation algorithm to maximize EE and Spectral Efficiency (SE). The numerical analysis of the simulation results indicates an improvement of 40% in EE and 50% in SE at the downlink transmission, compared to the other existing schemes. Furthermore, the results revealed that SE does not influence the EE enhancement after using the proposed algorithm as the number of Massive MIMO antenna at the Base Station (BS) increases.