A traffic-aware dynamic energy-saving scheme for cellular networks with heterogeneous traffic

In this paper, a traffic-aware dynamic energy-saving scheme with heterogeneous traffic is proposed, where voice traffic has preemptive priority over data traffic. The proposed scheme reduces the energy consumption by dynamically switching on/off resources according to call level traffic variation. The problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, and is solved by the value iteration algorithm. The dynamic scheme guarantees quality-of-service requirements with a call admission control scheme. Numerical and simulation results show that this dynamic policy performs much better than another policy in terms of energy-saving and blocking performance, where in the latter policy the number of active resources is only affected by the traffic arrival rate. It is also shown that with our proposed scheme, the number of active resources matches the traffic load variation very well.