Abstract
The dense deployment of heterogeneous networks (HetNets) has shown to be a promising direction to cope with the capacity demands in the future 5G wireless networks. The large number of small cell base stations (SBSs) in HetNets intended to help in achieving the capacity requirement of 5G networks can also result in a significant increase in energy consumption. This is due to the fact that there might be few associated users in certain SBSs, intelligently switching them to low energy consumption modes, or turning them off without seriously degrading system capacity is desirable in order to improve the energy savings in the HetNets. Also, the unnecessary handovers caused due to this dynamic power level switching in the SBS should not be neglected. In this paper, fuzzy logic-based game-theoretic framework is utilized to address these issues and examine the energy efficiency improvements in HetNets. We design fuzzy inference rules for handover decisions, and target base station selection is performed through a fuzzy ranking technique, while simultaneously considering both energy/spectral efficiency and signaling overhead. The results show that energy consumption can be improved considerably especially for high user velocities, while also managing ping-pong handovers.