QoE-Energy Aware Opportunistic Interference Scaling in Dense Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

Future wireless networks are expected to be heterogeneous with dense deployed small cells to achieving an unprecedented system capacity. In the dense deployment scenario, interference manifests new feature and tend to be more bursty. Bursty interference leads to drastic variation of signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) and hence affects users' quality of experience (QoE). Generally, power control is utilized to compensate the SINR variation, which is energy-inefficient in the dense and complex network scenario. Therefore this paper focuses on the bursty interference management. An overview of existing SINR based power control techniques is firstly present. Then an network-level mechanism termed as opportunistic interference scaling (OIS) is proposed to efficiently smooth the bursty interference by decreasing the transmit rate of co-channel bursty, user driven (BUD) traffic. In addition, based on the proposed QoE model, a QoE aware energy efficiency metric is introduced to study the trade-off between QoE and energy consumption when adopting OIS. A QoE-Energy aware optimization problem is further formulated and the modified particle swarm algorithm is used to solve it. Numerical results show that the proposed QoE-energy aware OIS can smooth the link variation, and guarantee the target quality level with less power consumption at the cost of negligible QoE degradation for BUD traffic.