QoE based random sleep-awake scheduling in heterogeneous cellular networks

In this paper, we investigate an optimal resource on-off switching framework that minimizes the energy consumption of a heterogeneous cellular network. Specifically, our goal is to minimize the energy consumption of the cellular network while satisfying a desired level of buffer starvation probability, which can be considered as a quality of experience (QoE) term. For an ON/OFF bursty arrival process, we introduce recursive equations to obtain the buffer starvation probability of a mobile device (MD) for streaming services. The MD is in the coverage area of a femtocell base station (FBS) which is implemented at the cell edge of a macrocell base station (MBS), and when its buffer gets empty, the media player of the MD restarts the service after a certain amount of packets are prefetched (this event is known as start-up delay in the literature). Numerical simulations illustrate how our system significantly reduces the overall energy consumption of the network while guaranteeing a target starvation probability in comparison to the case where the MD is covered only by one MBS.