Energy Consumption Minimization for FiWi Enhanced LTE-A HetNets with UE Connection Constraint

The fiber-wireless (FiWi) enhanced LTE-A HetNet, which consists of fiber optic networks as its backhaul and LTE-A HetNets as its wireless front-end, is regarded as a promising technique for a 5G radio access network to host large-scale mobile data transmission. In order to reduce the energy consumption of a FiWi enhanced LTE-A HetNet, we should offload the traffic of lightly loaded BSs to other active BSs and turn them into sleep state, while in order to provide stable service to more user equipments (UEs), we should put as many BSs into active state as possible. Obviously, there is a trade-off between minimizing the energy consumption and maximizing the number of UEs associated with the BSs. However, previous research works either focused on energy consumption minimization or placed emphasis on UE connection maximization, and few of them integrate these two parts together and give an optimal solution. Toward this end, this article studies the issues in energy consumption minimization with the UE connection constraint in FiWi enhanced LTE-A HetNets, and propose a heuristic greedy solution to find an optimal list of active BSs and their associated UEs.