A load-aware small-cell management mechanism to support green communications in 5G networks

摘要

Small cells are widely used to offer flexible deployment and improve signal quality. To serve an increasing number of users with large traffic demands, they are densely deployed in many hotspot regions to share the load of a macrocell. This network scenario is critical in the upcoming 5G epoch. However, the issue of managing small cells to provide load balance and save energy is rarely discussed. Therefore, the paper proposes a load-aware small-cell management (LSM) mechanism for 5G networks, which organizes small cells into groups. In each group, a chief base station (BS) is elected to manage mobile devices (MDs) in all small cells. When a cell contains many MDs, they are transferred to other cells to alleviate congestion in its BS. Beside, a BS serving only few MDs will sleep to save energy. Then, each BS allocates resource to its MDs with the objective of reducing packet discard of real-time flows. Through simulations, we show that LSM can better support green communications by saving more energy of BSs and keeping high network throughput.