Towards Throughput Aware and Energy Aware Traffic Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Networks with Hybrid Power Supplies

Abstract

Green communications has attracted much research attention for its environmental and economic benefits. For a cellular network, base stations (BSs) incur more than 50% of the energy consumption of the whole network. Therefore, BSs can be powered by green energy to reduce its on-grid power consumption. Meanwhile, the effective data rate (EDR) of a user's flow, which depends on both the user's channel condition and its BS's workload status, is an important metric for user performance. From the perspectives of a mobile provider, both the aggregated EDR (sum of EDRs of all users within the coverage area of a macro BS) and on-grid energy consumption should be taken into account in the traffic load balancing process. Therefore, we propose a throughput aware and energy aware (TEA) traffic load balancing scheme for heterogeneous cellular networks to optimize the above two metrics. Since the EDR and energy consumption mutually affect each other, saving on-grid power is at the cost of sacrificing a certain loss of EDR. Thus, we employ an energy-throughput coefficient α to adjust the tradeoff between the two metrics based on the mobile provider's practical requirements. Simulation results demonstrate that TEA improves the aggregated EDR and significantly saves on-grid power.