System Performance Enhancement with Energy Efficiency Based Sleep Control for 5G Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Abstract

This paper presents an improved sleep control algorithm for small base stations (SBSs) in 5G New Radio (NR) heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). HetNets consist of various base station tiers, including macro base stations (MBSs) and small base stations (SBSs), and have been suggested as a promising solution to enhance wireless coverage and network capacity, employing many SBSs into the MBS coverage. However, power consumption increases significantly as a result of an increase in the number of the SBSs. To solve this problem, the SBS sleep control has been proposed to reduce power consumption for the SBSs and improves energy efficiency, whereas it deteriorates system throughput compared with no sleep control system, consequently degrading the quality of service (QoS) performance at user equipments (UEs). This paper proposes an enhanced algorithm for SBS sleep control based on energy efficiency as a decision criterion for SBS operating state. From the evaluation results through computer simulation, the proposed scheme can provide improved performance for both energy efficiency and system throughput simultaneously, that is it can improve energy efficiency while maintaining almost the same system throughput as the no sleep control system. Concretely, the proposed scheme has the 14.89% improvement in energy efficiency while providing almost the same system throughput of over 99%, compared with no sleep control system.

Distributed Reinforcement Learning–based Seamless Multi-Connectivity Solution for Heterogeneous 5GNR and Wi-Fi Networks

“…The researchers have particularly focus on critical parameters such as throughput, interference, and latency, which significantly impact network performance. Considering a connectivity solutions for 5G NR heterogeneous cellular networks, the authors in [16] proposed an improved sleep control solution for new heterogeneous radio (NR) 5G cellular networks (HetNets) consisting of different base stations, including macro and small utilize licensed spectrum for transmission. The proposed solution is applied to enhance wireless coverage and network capacity, and energy efficiency.…”

“…Similarly, a seamless communication solution is proposed in [17,18] to enhance the quality of service (QoS) of heterogeneous wireless networks (HWNs) involving various applications using licensed spectrum. However, the solutions proposed in [16][17][18] challenges when scaling up to a larger network or a more complex environment, especially since it relies on the use of a single radio spectrum band, which may be insufficient, causing service outages as user requests increase. Furthermore, an approach based on utility-based handover decisions involves selecting the network with a lower load is proposed in [19] to provide better performance for vehicular network, particularly in terms of throughput and handover rate.…”

“…It provides a feedback to the agent, influencing its decisionmaking process throughout the system operation (lines 8-13). Once the Q-values are computed, the agent can use them to choose the action with the highest Q-value, indicating the optimal choice in that particular state (lines [14][15][16][17][18]. This selection process, based on maximizing the Q-values, allows the agent to make more effective and informed decisions.…”