A Queueing Theory Approach for Maximized Energy Efficiency Traffic Offloading

Traffic offloading is considered a promising solution to relieve the explosive congestion of future cellular networks. Existing works in the literature focus on increasing the number of offloaded users. Nevertheless, users' traffic load plays a critical role in having the ability to relay the data intended for the cellular users. In this paper, we consider the traffic offloading problem in a heterogeneous network (HetNet), with emphasis on the traffic load of each user in the network. Our objective is to maximize the total network energy efficiency (EE) while maintaining the system queues stability. We propose a heuristic offloading algorithm due to the non-convexity of the EE problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed offloading algorithm outperforms similar algorithms in the literature that do not take the users' traffic load into consideration during the offloading process. © 2020 IEEE.