Energy-Efficient Bandwidth and Power Allocation in Relay-Assisted Multi-Layer Heterogeneous Networks with Energy Harvesting

Aiming at excessive users existing in a pico base station (PBS) in the multi-layer heterogeneous networks, the resource allocation problem of maximizing the energy efficiency of the networks is investigated in this paper. By deploying a relay node with energy harvesting function, the data of some users in the PBS can be transferred to an adjacent idle PBS. The bandwidth and transmitting power of users and the relay node are both considered to formulate the resource allocation optimization problem. The objective is to maximize the energy efficiency of the whole heterogeneous networks under the constraints of the user’s minimum data rate and energy consumption. The suboptimal solution is obtained by using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm. Simulation results show that the adopted methods have higher energy efficiency than the conventional fixed power and bandwidth method. In addition, the time complexity of the adopted methods is relatively low.