Cloud-aware power control for cloud-enabled small cells

Abstract

Requirements of current services and applications on computational power are still increasing. Hence, the utilization of these by the mobile user equipment (UE) having limited battery lifetime is quite a challenge. To cope with this problem, the mobile cloud computing can be exploited to offload high complex applications to the cloud. Nevertheless, the conventional mobile cloud solution introduces high delay and limits the use of delay sensitive services and applications. One feasible solution is to enhance small cells (SCeNBs) with computing capabilities and, thus, perform computing closer to the users accomplishing low delay. However, the high density deployment of the SCeNBs and UEs' mobility can result in often outage situation or handover when low delay tolerant data cannot be delivered from the cloud on time and become irrelevant. In this paper we propose power control algorithm, which purpose is to guarantee that the requests processed by the small cell cloud are received by the UE within required delay. This is done by coarse and dynamic fine setting of the SCeNB's transmitting power level. The simulations demonstrate the amount of undelivered requests from the small cell cloud can be significantly minimized when compared to competitive schemes. At the same time, QoS of non-cloud users is only slightly impaired when compared to the scheme giving solely preferences to non-cloud users. We also show that the overhead introduced by our power control mechanism is negligible.