Energy efficiency heterogeneous wireless communication network with QoS support

Abstract

The overarching goal of this thesis is to investigate network architectures, and find the trade-off between low overall energy use and maintaining the level of quality of service (QoS), or even improve it. The ubiquitous wireless communications environment supports the exploration of different network architectures and techniques, the so-called heterogeneous network. Two kinds of heterogeneous architectures are considered: a combined cellular and femtocell network and a combined cellular, femtocell and Wireless Local Area Network(WLAN) network. This thesis concludes that the investigated heterogeneous networks can significantly reduce the overall power consumption, depending on the uptake of femtocells and WLANs. Also, QoS remains high when the power consumption drops. The main energy saving is from reducing the macrocell base station embodied and operational energy. When QoS is evaluated based on the combined cellular and femtocell architecture, it is suggested that use of resource scheduling for femtocells within the macrocell is crucial since femtocell performance is affected significantly by interference when installed in a co-channel system. Additionally, the femtocell transmission power mode is investigated using either variable power level or a fixed power level. To achieve both energy efficiency and QoS, the choice of system configurations should change according to the density of the femtocell deployment. When combining deployment of femtocells with WLANs, more users are able to experience a higher QoS. Due to increasing of data traffic and smartphone usage in the future, WLANs are more important for offloading data from the macrocell, reducing power consumption and also increasing the bandwidth. The localised heterogeneous network is a promising technique for achieving power efficiency and a high QoS system.