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Driven by green communications, energy-efficient transmission is becoming an important design criterion for wireless systems, aiming to extend the life cycle of batteries in mobile devices. In this paper, we tackle the energy efficiency (EE) issue in uplink virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which requires the optimization of two interlaced parameters: the number of constituent mobile users in the virtual MIMO and their corresponding power allocation. The former parameter is a structural parameter defining the size of the virtual MIMO (usually known as the transmission mode) and its optimization relies on the method of enumeration. The difficulty is further aggravated by the fact that the EE is a non-convex function of power, even for a given transmission mode. By exploiting the fact that increasing the number of active users can increase the number of contributors to the total EE on one hand but …