Optimal Control of Wake Up Mechanisms of Femtocells in Heterogeneous Networks

We study, in this work, optimal sleep/wake up schemes for the base stations of network-operated femto cells deployed within macro cells for the purpose of offloading part of its traffic. Our aim is to minimize the energy consumption of the overall heterogeneous network while preserving the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by users. We model such a system at the flow level, considering a dynamic user configuration, and derive, using Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), optimal sleep/wake up schemes based on the information on traffic load and user localization in the cell, in the cases where this information is complete, partial or delayed. Our results quantify the energy consumption and QoS perceived by the users in each of these cases and identify the tradeoffs between those two quantities. We also illustrate numerically the optimal policies in different traffic scenarios.