Energy Consumption Oriented Grouping in Uplink with Terminal Collaborative Beamforming Transmission

This paper proposes energy consumption oriented grouping in terminal collaborative beamforming (BF) transmission for the uplink of the fifth generation mobile communication. By utilizing both millimeter-wave and Sub-6 bands, BF transmission through terminal collaboration enhances received signal power. However, previous studies have not taken energy consumption of each user equipment (UE). Therefore, this paper introduces a grouping scheme with cumulative energy consumption. Each UE leaves and rejoins a group for terminal collaborative BF transmission according to its cumulative energy consumption. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the proposed scheme minimizes the amount of reduction in system throughput while maintaining fairness among UEs. The proposed scheme reduces the cumulative energy consumption by a factor of about 0.6 with little costs of a user throughput and a fairness index.