QoE-Aware Energy Efficient Hierarchical Small Cell Deployment for Multimedia IoT Services

Traffic proliferation induced by mobile video streaming has been evoking tremendous challenges to resource management in 5G Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. Although small cell based heterogeneous network is capable of traffic offloading, it still requires a systemic deployment with optimal allocation and resource management to deal with high data rates and network densification of mobile video streaming users. In this paper, we propose a two-tier hierarchical small cell based heterogeneous network infrastructure to tackle the aforementioned challenges. In particular, we develop an offline tier for the long-term small cell allocation, formulated with energy efficiency and predicted quality of experience (QoE) maximization. We also propose an online tier, characterizing the real-time on-demand network-slicing based small cell deployment, to optimize the dynamic QoE of users. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves optimal energy efficiency and real-time improved QoE performance simultaneously, for different scale of heterogeneous IoT networks with dynamic mobile video streaming requirements by users, and clear advantages in highly dense networks with high percentage of video streaming services in IoT HetNets.