Green 5G femtocells for supporting indoor generated IoT traffic

Abstract

Supporting the traffic emanating from the internet of things (IoT) is a major challenge for 5G systems. A significant portion of this traffic will be generated indoors. Therefore, in this chapter, femtocell networks designed for supporting IoT traffic are studied. A deployment scenario of femtocell networks with centralized control is investigated. It consists of an integrated wired/wireless system, where the femtocell access points (FAPs) are controlled by a single entity. This permits performing joint radio resource management in a centralized and controlled way in order to enhance the quality of service performance for all users in the network. It also allows an energy efficient operation of the network by switching off redundant femtocells whenever possible. Two algorithms are proposed and analyzed. The first one is a utility maximizing radio resource management algorithm, whereas the second one is a FAP switch off algorithm, implemented at the central controller. The joint wired/wireless resource management approach is compared to the distributed resource management case, where each femtocell acts as an independent wireless network unaware of the channel and interference conditions with the other cells. The proposed algorithm was shown to lead to significant gains. Furthermore, considerable energy savings were obtained with the green algorithm.