On the study of fundamental trade-offs between QoE and energy efficiency in wireless networks

During recent years, for the ever-growing number of users with the exponential growth of high-data-rate traffic demand, quality of experience (QoE) has emerged as an important issue, providing important measures and assessment metrics for users, service providers and operators. Meanwhile, rapid development of information and communications technology significantly contributes to the increasing trend of energy consumption and global warming. As a result, green communications that mainly studies energy efficiency (EE) has become an inevitable method to reduce energy consumption, which attracts the attention of both the academia and industries. However, currently, very few research works have been carried out to address the relationship between QoE and EE, which is an important issue for designing a system with QoE and EE trade-offs. In this paper, we show that there exist fundamental trade-offs between EE and QoE for users with different traffics, that is, voice, best effort and quality-of-service traffic, considering various power consumptions including transmission power, circuit power, interference and network bandwidth all together. A new metric of QoE per watt is introduced, and the fundamental EE–QoE relationship is addressed for different proportions of user groups in an interference-limited cellular network. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. *Correspondence X. Zhang, Wireless Signal Processing and Network Laboratory, Key Laboratory of Universal Wireless Communication, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, PO Box 93, Beijing 100876, China. E-mail: [email protected] Received 30 May 2012; Revised 18 February 2013; Accepted 10 March 2013