Fair energy-efficient resource allocation based on queue balancing in data and energy integrated communication networks

With the rapid advancement of wireless network technologies and the constant increase in the number of mobile devices, enormous amount of data is generated from a set of user equipments (UEs), such as mobile phones and wearable devices. How to power these devices wirelessly becomes a challenging issue. Meanwhile, data and energy integrated communication networks (DEINs) are emerging as a new type of wireless networks emphasizing on the cooperation between wireless information and energy transfer. This means that the DEINs can be a solution to tackle with powering UEs wirelessly and further achieving a higher data rate. However, there are no researches that have been studied about how to obtain the optimal scheme in DEINs under the consideration of data traffic. Hence, we propose a fair energy-efficient resource allocation algorithm for DEINs in this paper. Our objective is to optimize the energy efficiency with the consideration of providing fair queuing for data traffic by minimizing the queue length difference among the UEs' buffers. Besides, when designing the downlink energy beamforming and the downlink-uplink power-and-time allocation scheme, power sensitivity of conversion circuits and system stability are taken into account. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed resource allocation algorithm does not only improve the fairness among UEs by queue balancing, but also achieve close-to-optimal system energy efficiency by the beamforming design and resource allocation.