Cost and Energy Aware Dynamic Splitting of Video Traffic in Heterogeneous Networks

The vision towards 5G and beyond is to provide remarkable performance enhancements that enable the launch of new services and markets in different industry verticals. Example scenarios of those services include indoor hotspot, broadband access in a crowd, and dense urban; many of which require very high data rates. Traffic offloading and device-to-device cooperation have been leveraged to expand the system capacity and coverage through using heterogeneous network technologies. In this work, we shed the light on the significant gains incurred when predicted short term network performance is factored into network splitting decisions over multiple wireless interfaces, while guaranteeing a desired quality of experience to end users. Accordingly, we allow dynamic use of multiple network interfaces taking into consideration their energy requirement and price models to deliver premium services and minimize the overall energy consumption and total cost. We develop a novel and efficient real-time traffic splitting approach that makes use of predicted bit rate of each network interface in addition to device-to-device cooperation to decide on the amount of video traffic to be delivered on each interface at every time slot. The proposed approach is validated and evaluated under realistic network conditions. Simulation results demonstrate substantial gains in terms of energy consumption, data cost and quality of user experience as compared to multiple alternative solutions.