Throughput aware and green energy aware user association in heterogeneous networks

Greening information and communications technology is becoming an environmental and economic sine qua non, and has attracted much research attention. For a cellular network, base stations (BSs) incur more than 50% of the energy consumption of the whole network. Therefore, BSs can be powered by green energy to reduce its on-grid power consumption. Meanwhile, the throughput has always been a critical issue in cellular networks. Since the throughput and energy consumption mutually affect each other, saving on-grid power is at the cost of sacrificing a certain amount of throughput. In this paper, we propose a Throughput Aware and Green Energy aware user association (TAGE) scheme in heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) to optimize the trade-off between the throughput and on-grid power consumption. Meanwhile, we employ an energy-throughput coefficient α to control the energy-throughput tradeoff. The simulation results verify that TAGE improves the effective throughput and saves a significant amount of on-grid power for HCNs.