Abstract
In machine-type communication (MTC) networks, each node is equipped with a set of radio-frequency (RF) transceivers, antennas and power source. Besides, wireless nodes are typically battery-powered, whose recharging or replacement is often not viable or even impossible. Therefore, in such systems where energy is at a premium, minimizing power consumption improves energy efficiency and increases battery lifetime. In this paper, a novel energy-saving approach includes in the communication system model the use of reconfigurable RF transceivers. More specifically, the components involved in our power minimization framework are the power amplifier (PA) at the transmitter and the low noise amplifier (LNA) at the receiver, which are the blocks responsible for RF amplification and are on top of power consuming blocks in RF transceivers. Our goal is to show that RF circuits based on multimode operation can significantly improve the energy efficiency. We perform a joint selection of the best operating modes for PA and LNA circuits in different communication scenarios. Results show that by combining PA and LNA operating modes, an improvement of more than 75% in energy efficiency is obtained for multiple antenna communications, when compared to the state-of-the-art literature of non-reconfigurable amplifiers. Besides, we show that adapting spectral efficiency contributes towards improving energy efficiency. In this case, we consider different spectral efficiency values, including the effect that the PA operates at different backed-off power levels. In addition, when comparing single-input single-output (SISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission schemes, antenna selection (AS) outperforms the others schemes in terms of energy efficiency for short and moderate distances, but singular value decomposition (SVD) allows for longer communication distances.
Highlights
Low-power, low-size and low-cost implementations are essential in several applications for sensing, monitoring and control, of which machine-type communication (MTC) scenarios typically consist
By exploiting the characteristic of reconfigurable circuits, we achieved more than 75% of energy efficiency improvement for short-range communications in multiple antenna scenarios, compared to the case of nonreconfigurable power amplifier (PA) and low noise amplifier (LNA) designs
We compare the performance of the reconfigurable PA and LNA described in Sections II-A and II-B, respectively, with two state-of-the-art non-reconfigurable designs from the literature
Summary
Low-power, low-size and low-cost implementations are essential in several applications for sensing, monitoring and control, of which machine-type communication (MTC) scenarios typically consist. MTC networks are one of the most. The number of connected devices is expected to be substantially large in wireless networks, 50 billion connected devices by 2020 according to [4]. Such massive collection of devices will have great challenges in terms of connectivity, reconfigurability. E. L. dos Santos et al.: Energy Efficiency in Multiple Antenna MTCs With Reconfigurable RF Transceivers and energy efficiency. Since wireless nodes will be mainly powered by batteries, or even by solar cells that can seldom or never be recharged, one of the most noteworthy concerns is the efficient use of limited power sources [5]
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