Energy Saving Mechanism for Future HetNets

In this paper, we study the energy consumption in heterogeneous networks (HetNets). HetNets are known to be one of the main characteristics of the future 5G networks. In this work we aim to minimize the global energy consumed within these networks by adapting the network density to the operating traffic load. We formulate this problem by expressing the energy gain (i.e., the energy saved) which should be maximized for an optimal network configuration, and then we show that finding an optimal solution for this problem is NP-Complete; thus we propose a feasible solution based on estimating the network state using queuing networks. Given that state, we proceed to adapt the network infrastructure by taking into account users required capacity. We study in our experimentations the performance of the proposed method according to different criteria; the results show significant improvements in terms of energy consumption while preserving as much as possible users' requirements in terms of capacity.