Dynamic resource allocation and activity management for improving energy efficiency and fairness in 5G heterogeneous networks

Abstract

The higher energy consumption of Heterogeneous Networks (HetNet) compared to Macro Only Networks (MONET) raises a great concern about the energy e ciency of HetNets. In this thesis a dynamic activation strategy is proposed which changes the state of small cells between Active and Idle according to the dynamically changing user tra c in order to increase the energy e ciency of HetNets. Moreover, both inter-tier and inter-cell resource allocations are adjusted dynamically. The proposed strategy, Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation Dynamic Activation (DBADA), is applied in a small cell deployment where HotSpot regions are located at the cell edge and a small cell is located at the center of each HotSpot. The objective is to maximize the sum utility of the network with minimum energy consumption. To ensure proportional fairness in the network, the logarithmic utility function is employed. To evaluate the performance of the DBADA strategy over the proposed network topology, the median and 10- percent rates and the energy consumed per unit of these metrics are studied. Our simulation results reveal that the DBADA strategy can achieve the highest median and 10-percent rates among other scenarios. In addition, compared to always active scenario for small cells, DBADA decreases the energy consumption per unit of median and 10-percent rates by at least 26% and 21%, respectively.