Energy efficient transmission in wireless communication networks

In this dissertation, we study energy efficient transmission in wireless communication networks. The general problem of energy efficient transmission over wireless networks is formulated into optimization problems for the following distinct (but inter-related) settings: Problem Setting 1: The minimization of energy (power) consumption given a system throughput and other constraints, and Problem Setting 2: The maximization of system throughput given energy (power) constraints. Under Problem Setting 1, we focus on energy efficient transmission problems over wideband channels. The first result we obtain is as follows: We consider a two user multiple access channel. In this multiple access channel, previous research shows that cooperation with respect to block error rate is only possible if two transmitters share their sources completely. However, we find that a modified pulse position modulation with synchronization enables cooperation without complete sharing of their sources between two transmitters if we replace a block error rate requirement with a normalized error rate constraint. Normalized error rate, a quantity that resembles bit error rate, is developed in this work as an error metric that is of value in practical communication systems. We show full cooperation between two transmitters without sharing their sources by deriving that the minimum energy per bit required for reliable transmission reduces by quarter compared with the minimum energy per bit required for point-to-point channels. Next, we generalize this analysis to a cognitive communication framework with a wideband cognitive transmitter, which can causally sense signal levels over multiple frequency bands, and a cognitive receiver. We assume that multiple legitimate users already exist in the system and each one transmits in its own non-overlapping frequency band. In this setting, from order statistical analysis, we show that the wideband cognitive transmit-receive pair is able to communicate reliably with minimum energy as if the legitimate users were absent from the system, while causing negligible interference to bandlimited legitimate users. The wideband cognitive transmit-receive pair employs a strategy defined as opportunistic group orthogonal signaling to achieve the minimum energy per bit. Under Problem Setting 2, we investigate the impact of correlation and transmit and receive strategies on the throughput of multiple antenna broadcast channels in cellular networks. With perfect channel state information at the transmitter, it is well known that dirty paper coding (DPC) is the optimal multi-user broadcast transmission method. However, with partial channel state information at the transmitter, the picture changes significantly. Specifically, since multi-user transmission is unable to employ DPC perfectly, singleuser transmission strategies can have a better performance than multi-user transmission strategies when we have a small number of users and correlated antenna gains. We explore the trade-offs between the single-user and multiuser MIMO transmission strategies. Order statistical analysis provides us with both analytical expressions and insights about these trade-offs. We verify that the analytical framework that we develop is accurate by checking the values obtained against numerical results. From this analysis, we confirm that 'mode switching' between single-user and multi-user MIMO transmission schemes is necessary for maximizing throughput for emerging MIMO solutions. Finally, we suggest an adaptive mode switching algorithm between single-user and multi-user MIMO transmission strategies based on this analytical framework.