Energy-Efficient QoE-Driven Radio Resource Management Method for 5G and Beyond Networks

Abstract

Energy-efficient Radio Resource Management (RRM) for 5G and beyond networks has become a key research challenge due to increasing Small Cells (SCs) densities and the high Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements of business users. Ensuring QoE and energy efficiency is essential in mobile networks, but these goals are often opposing and rarely addressed simultaneously in existing solutions. In this paper, we propose to include the QoE criterion in the RRM technique for 5G and beyond multi-layer networks, which will allow ordering individual QoE for business users. We developed a new radio resource allocation and optimization method to address changing user QoE requirements and reduce energy consumption in multi-layer 5G networks. The proposed method differs from the known ones in that it considers the QoE requirements of business users and load localization to optimally distribute the service process between Macro Cells (MCs) and SCs. This method uses a Voronoi diagram to energy-efficiently design the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) by switching SCs to sleep mode when they are not serving active users. As a result, a balance is struck between user QoE requirements and network energy efficiency. Based on simulations, it is proved that the proposed method allowed more efficient use of accessible radio resources by 25% and reduced the energy consumption of the 5G RAN by 8.7% to provide the ordered QoE for users compared to traditional RRM methods.

Keywords

• Energy consumption
• energy efficiency
• heterogeneous networks (HetNet)
• quality of experience (QoE)
• radio resource management (RRM)
• radio access network (RAN)