Throughput and Energy Consumption Trade-Off in Traffic Splitting in Heterogeneous Networks with Dual Connectivity

This paper investigates the trade-off between throughput and energy consumption in heterogeneous networks with dual connectivity and backhaul delay. The problem of traffic splitting between the main eNB and secondary eNBs is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Based on some observations, assumptions, and subsequent simplifications, two algorithms are devised. One targets throughput optimization (TO) by transmission delay minimization. The other one does energy savings (ES) by not transmitting on the main eNB depending on the delay allowance defined in the QoS criterion of the transmitted data. The main eNB is in control of the data transfer to the secondary eNB. Simulations show that the TO algorithm performs slightly better than an earlier published algorithm in which the secondary eNBs are in control of the data transfer from the main eNB. The ES algorithm does save energy at the expense of a larger transmission delay.