Pricing in Noncooperative Interference Channels for Improved Energy Efficiency

We consider noncooperative energy-efficient resource allocation in the interference channel. Energy efficiency is achieved when each system pays a price proportional to its allocated transmit power. In noncooperative game-theoretic notation, the power allocation chosen by the systems corresponds to the Nash equilibrium. We study the existence and characterize the uniqueness of this equilibrium. Afterwards, pricing to achieve energy-efficiency is examined. We introduce an arbitrator who determines the prices that satisfy minimum QoS requirements and minimize total power consumption. This energy-efficient assignment problem is formulated and solved. We compare our setting to that without pricing with regard to energy-efficiency by simulation. It is observed that pricing in this distributed setting achieves higher energy-efficiency in different interference regimes.