  The characterization of the global maximum of energy efficiency (EE) problems
in wireless networks is a challenging problem due to the non-convex nature of
investigated problems in interference channels. The aim of this work is to
develop a new and general framework to achieve globally optimal solutions.
First, the hidden monotonic structure of the most common EE maximization
problems is exploited jointly with fractional programming theory to obtain
globally optimal solutions with exponential complexity in the number of network
links. To overcome this issue, we also propose a framework to compute
suboptimal power control strategies characterized by affordable complexity.
This is achieved by merging fractional programming and sequential optimization.
The proposed monotonic framework is used to shed light on the ultimate
performance of wireless networks in terms of EE and also to benchmark the
performance of the lower-complexity framework based on sequential programming.
Numerical evidence is provided to show that the sequential fractional
programming framework achieves global optimality in several practical
communication scenarios.
