Is accumulative information useful for designing energy efficient transmission?

Energy efficiency (EE) has become an important design goal for mobile communication systems. Since the EE of a system is evaluated during a period of time, a transmission strategy designed from maximizing instantaneous EE (INEE) may not achieve the maximal EE of the system. To exploit the accumulative nature of the energy, accumulative EE (ACEE) can be used as the objective function, which is the ratio of the accumulated amount of data transmitted to the accumulated energy consumed until the time for optimization. In this paper, we study when ACEE is beneficial to EE-oriented optimization. By taking a single user multi-antenna multi-subcarrier system serving two classes of traffic as an example, we formulate three problems to optimize rate allocation among subcarriers and time slots respectively maximizing the INEE, ACEE and EE upper-bound, which can be easily extended to multi-user systems. We proceed to analyze the behavior and performance of the corresponding solutions. Analytical and simulation results show that using ACEE yields a more energy efficient design for the systems serving best effort traffic with less transmit antennas, serving less users simultaneously or at low signal to noise ratio under time-varying channels. However, the conclusions for real-time traffic are different.