On the effects of transmit power control on the energy consumption of WiFi network cards

Transmit power control has been largely proposed as a solution to improve the performance of packet radio systems in terms of increased throughput, spatial reuse and battery lifetime for mobile terminals. However, the benefits of transmit power control schemes on these different performance figures may strongly depend on the employed PHY technology and channel access mechanism. In this paper, we focus on the effects of power control on the energy consumption of WiFi network cards. By means of several experimental tests carried out under different operation conditions and modulation schemes, we try to justify why the reduction of the transmission power has a marginal effect on the overall en…

Maximizing network capacity in an heterogeneous macro-micro cellular scenario

The problem of resource allocation in cellular networks has been traditionally faced at two different levels: at the network level, in terms of frequency planning and reuse pattern design, and at the cell level, in terms of cell capacity optimizations based on channel-dependent scheduling, link adaptation, power control, and so on. While this second aspect has been deeply investigated in literature, the first aspect has been mainly faced with static or semi-dynamic reuse utilization solutions. In this paper we deal with the problem of multi-cellular resource allocation in heterogeneous OFDMA environments with reuse factor equal to 1, where base stations with different power constraints coex…

Resource allocations in heterogeneous 4G wireless networks