Energy vs QoE Tradeoff of Dense Mobile Networks

Energy consumption is one of the primary concerns of modern dense small cell networks. One of the key concepts to improve the energy efficiency of a dense network is to turn off a part of its base stations (BS) when they are idle or only lightly loaded, since even then a considerable amount of energy is consumed. In this paper we analytically investigate the tradeoff between energy efficiency and user experience, which is measured in terms of users' delay assuming a non-saturated traffic model. We provide an overall network performance with respect to the BS density and insights that can be valuable in terms of network design. Our analysis is based on a) a BS's linear energy consumption model b) stochastic geometry to model the topology of the network and the users and c) queuing theory in order to capture the flow-level performance. Our model is being applied to the popular LTE radio access technology but it can easily be extend to others. Our results provide guidelines and bounds that are able to predict the energy efficiency of the designed network.