Energy-efficient traffic offloading for mobile users in two-tier heterogeneous wireless networks

摘要

Heterogeneous wireless networks have been proposed as an efficient network structure to handle explosive data traffic. Although many researchers have focused on traffic offloading strategies, they rarely considered user mobility and energy efficiency in large-scale heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, a large-scale two-tier heterogeneous wireless network modeled by using stochastic approaches has been developed firstly. After given the transfer data with deadline and trace, the Stochastic Programming based Handover Scheduling (SP-HS) has been explained. Then, to minimize the total energy consumption of mobile user equipments, an algorithm that determines how user equipments switch between different networks along with their traveling trajectory is designed. We have conducted extensive simulated experiments to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. The simulated results indicate that up to 34% energy could be saved under typical network settings by using SP-HS.