In this paper, a novel resource allocation algorithm is investigated to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) in multiuser decode-and-forward (DF) relay interference networks. The EE optimization problem is formulated as the ratio of the spectrum efficiency (SE) over the entire power consumption of the network subject to total transmit power, subcarrier pairing and allocation constraints. The formulated problem is a nonconvex fractional mixed binary integer programming problem, i.e., NP-hard to

more »

... lve. Further, we resolve the convexity of the problem by a series of convex transformations and propose an iterative EE maximization (EEM) algorithm to jointly determine the optimal subcarrier pairing at the relay, subcarrier allocation to each user pair and power allocation to all source and the relay nodes. Additionally, we derive an asymptotically optimal solution by using the dual decomposition method. To gain more insights into the obtained solutions, we further analyze the resource allocation algorithm in a two-user case with interference-dominated and noise-dominated regimes. In addition, a suboptimal algorithm is investigated with reduced complexity at the cost of acceptable performance degradation. Simulation results are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms and demonstrate the impacts of various network parameters on the attainable EE and SE.