Distributed heterogeneous traffic delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks

In order to meet the spectacular growth in mobile data traffic, one of the technologies is heterogeneous network, where small cells overlaid by large cells can be deployed. With such, base stations (BSs) can be of heterogeneous characteristics in bandwidth, capacity, load, backhaul delay, etc. Meanwhile, the traffic of diverse applications of a mobile station (MS) can be of heterogeneous quality of service (QoS) in rate, delay, etc. This paper proposes a framework to solve the problem of how to efficiently deliver heterogeneous traffic with heterogeneous QoS requirements in heterogeneous networks. We formulate optimization problems, to associate traffic flows with different QoS requirements of an MS to multiple BSs, so that QoS requirements can be satisfied, where the BS backhaul conditions are taken into account. Algorithms are proposed based on analysis. Numerical results show our framework can provide more efficiency in delay stringent and delay astringent traffic delivery.