Energy-efficient dynamic traffic offloading in HetNets

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).