Electromagnetic emission-aware resource allocation for the uplink of OFDM wireless communication systems

Abstract

With wireless communications increasingly becoming popular and convergent, service providers have to continuously upgrade their networks in order to support the increasing demand for bandwidth. However, given that wireless communication systems operate on radiofrequency waves, the health effects of electromagnetic (EM) emission from these systems are increasingly becoming a concern due to the ubiquity of mobile communication devices. In order to address these concerns, we propose in this paper, an EM emission reduction scheme for the uplink of OFDM wireless systems. We formulate the EM reduction scheme as a convex optimization problem and solve it by allocating bits to users on their respective subcarriers. This is based on the assumption that the network can predict the channel state information of all the users for a given transmission window. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme significantly outperforms the benchmark classic greedy spectral efficiency (SE) based scheme and an energy efficiency based scheme by at least 3 and 2 orders of magnitude, respectively.