Abstract
In this paper, we study the energy efficiency (EE) of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular networks. Our objective is to present a power allocation scheme that maximizes the EE of downlink communications. We propose a novel explicit expression of the optimal power allocation to each subcarrier. We also present the power control when the transmit power is limited by power budget constraint or/and minimal rate constraint and we highlight the occurrence of sonic transmission outage events depending on the constraints' parameters. In the numerical results, we show that our proposed power control improves the EE especially at high power budget regime and low minimal rate regime. In addition, we show that having a higher number of subcarriers enhances the OFDMA EE.