Exploring energy consumption issues for multimedia streaming in LTE HetNet Small Cells

Due to the ever growing mobile broadband data traffic over the cellular networks, the small cell deployment is seen as a promising solution for the network operators to increase their network capacity at low cost. This in turn would lead to an increase number of handovers (HOs) for the mobile users, which could affect the device power consumption. In this context, this paper investigates the impact of the HO process on the device energy consumption while performing VoD over a real LTE Small Cell experimental environment. Subjective tests are carried out to study the impact of the video quality on the user perceived QoE. The results show that by changing the quality level of the multimedia stream the energy can be greatly conserved while the user perceived QoE is still acceptable. Furthermore, by adapting to a lower quality level during the HO process, up to 56% energy savings could be achieved.