Energy-efficient dynamic traffic offloading in HetNets

• Published in: IET Conference Proceedings
• Main Authors: Wang, Xun, Feng, Gang, Qin, Shuang, Liu, Qimei
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Stevenage The Institution of Engineering & Technology 21.09.2015
• Subjects: Algorithms; Broadband; Cellular communication; Computation offloading; Computer simulation; Dynamic programming; Energy conservation; Energy consumption; Energy efficiency; Energy management; Mathematical models; Power efficiency; Propagation; Simulation; Traffic delay; Traffic engineering; Traffic flow; Traffic information; Traffic models; Wireless networks
• ISBN: 1785610341; 9781785610349
• DOI: 10.1049/cp.2015.0706

With the anticipated exponentially increasing traffic demand in future mobile networks, energy consumption becomes a significant challenge of the information and communication technology industry. Heterogeneous network (HetNet) is a promising infrastructure for both expenditure and energy saving for cellular operators and has attracted intensive research interest. In HetNets, offloading traffic from macro base station (BS) to Low Power Nodes (LPNs) is expected to be a promising method in improving energy efficiency of cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a dynamic traffic offloading scheme to improve energy efficiency of HetNets. We model the traffic offloading in HetNets as a dynamic programming (DP) problem, where the delay tolerance of data traffic is taken into account. We conduct simulation experiments based on the model with realistic broadband channel propagation conditions to verify the effectiveness of our proposed traffic offloading scheme. Numerical results show that comparing with Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) based offloading algorithm, our proposed algorithm can effectively improve energy efficiency (EE).