A Systematic Approach to Jointly Optimize Rate and Power Consumption for OFDM Systems

In this paper, we adopt a multiobjective optimization for the bit and power allocation problem in order to meet the requirements of emerging wireless systems, i.e., achieving higher throughput without considerably increasing the transmit power. More specifically, we propose to simultaneously maximize the throughput and minimize the transmit power of an OFDM system subject to average bit error rate (BER), power budget, and maximum allocated number of bits per subcarrier constraints. The formulated optimization problem is not convex and we use an evolutionary algorithm, i.e., genetic algorithm, in order to obtain the solution. We study the structure of the problem and the obtained solution and notice that the constraint on the average BER can be replaced by a BER per subcarrier constraint. As such, we propose an approximate non-convex optimization problem. We further exploit the structure of the approximate optimization problem and notice that the BER constraint per subcarrier (i.e., the source of the non-convexity) must be satisfied with an equality sign and can be substituted; this leads to an equivalent convex optimization problem where the global optimality of the Pareto solutions is guaranteed. Closed-form expressions are obtained for the bit and power allocations with reduced complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed multiobjective optimization approach provides significant performance improvements over single objective optimization techniques presented in the literature, without incurring additional complexity.