A novel approach to energy-aware resource management: Toward green NOMA heterogeneous networks

Abstract

The dense deployment of small cell networks is a key feature of next generation mobile networks aimed at providing the necessary capacity increase. In order to reach an acceptable performance in such ultra-dense networks, real-time resource management is of great importance. Therefore, self-optimization networking is proposed as the only viable solution to increase the networks’ utility. This paper proposed a self-optimizing model to enhance network performance and guarantee the users’ QoS requirements by considering limited resources and using effective user association, carrier scheduling and handover optimization algorithms. In order to maximize the network performance, we applied the smart backhauling technique in order to analyze the signaling to increase the validity of the decision making process. Based on the semantic information extracted from the access layer, the network decision-making center is able to adjust the network parameters and resource allocation effectively. The goal function is defined as maximizing the total energy efficiency by considering the transmission power, energy harvesting capability and the user QoS constraints so that the idle small cells are considered turned off temporarily to boost the power efficiency. Although the optimization problem is non-convex, a quadratic mixed-integer function is solved to obtain a global optimal solution. Since the actual implementation of the real-time algorithm has high computational complexity, two algorithms with different complexity levels are proposed. These algorithms use the carrier matching feature and optimal transmission power for problem-solving. The simulation results prove that, despite the increased computational complexity, effective resource allocation and optimal HO relations made the proposed approach capable to increase performance indices such as network throughput by up to 30%.