Joint optimisation of radio and infrastructure resources for energy-efficient massive data storage in the mobile cloud over 5G HetNet

Abstract

This study formulates the problem of radio resource and data transmission strategy in a dense HetNet enhanced with mobile cloud computing and mobile edge computing technologies as a combinatorial optimisation problem. An ant colony optimisation (ACO)-based energy-aware algorithm is proposed as solution approach, which consists of a data transmission management scheme and a physical resource blocks/bandwidth allocation scheme. Simulation results show that compared with baseline approaches [(greedy and data split multiple user equipment (UEs) algorithms]), the proposed ACO-based algorithm achieves: (i) about 99% of reduction in terms of transmission delay under varying data file sizes (resp. varying number of UEs in the network); (ii) about 99% of reduction in terms of transmission energy dissipated by an UE during transmission of a file under varying data file sizes (resp. varying number of UEs in the network); (iii) improved performance with an increase in the number of small base stations in the network, (iv) significant reduction in the energy transmitted (by the UE) during transmission of big data files to the cloud storage; and (v) some stability irrespective of the variation in network conditions such as increasing the number of active UEs or increasing the number of UEs in the network.