Content-aware transmission with delay threshold in heterogeneous networks

With the popularity of smart devices, content based internet services are growing rapidly. Different from real-time services, the end-to-end delay requirements of the contents are much less stringent. In this paper, we consider the delay-tolerant content-aware delivery in two-tier heterogeneous wireless networks. Taking transmit power consumption into account, we propose a new transmission framework by pushing users from macrocells to small cells at the cost of tolerable delay. We model the tolerable delay of content delivery in a stochastic way by considering users´ interests. In this model, we adopt a progressively decreasing interest function which treats the delay as its argument. A modified Black-Scholes model is adopted to model the interest function. Thus, there exists a tradeoff between users´ experience and power consumption. We consider power efficiency under a certain level of quality of experience (QoE) to handle this tradeoff. A content-aware transmission scheme with the optimal power efficiency is proposed. Simulation results show that under the maximal power efficiency criterion, about 18% of power consumption is reduced while about 90% of users´ interests is preserved.