Energy efficiency optimization-oriented control plane and user plane adaptation with a frameless network architecture for 5G

In order to fully explore the merits of the multi-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet) and ultra-dense small cell deployments, the evolution of the cellular network architecture is on the way. Based on the frameless network architecture, this paper proposes the control plane (CP) and user plane (UP) adaptation strategy to improve the system energy efficiency (EE). In this paper, we give a three-step system EE optimization with constraints on the CP/UP adaptation. We optimize the system EE via CP and UP construction and adaptation while guaranteeing the user quality of service (QoS). In the first step, the CP construction and adaptation scheme is proposed through the Voronoi Diagram with EE improvements. In the second step, by jointly allocating the AE and subchannel resources, we construct the on-demand user-centric UP. In the last step, based on the UP construction from the second step, we adjust each UP to optimize the EE performance. This is achieved by employing game theory. Furthermore, we verify the existence and uniqueness of the Nash Equilibrium for the non-cooperative game model with pricing. Finally, the system-level simulation results show that, with constraints on the QoS of the users, the system EE performances are improved.