A Semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) for active state control of a heterogeneous network

Due to growing demand on wireless data traffic, a large number of different types of base stations (BSs) have been installed. However, space-time dependent wireless data traffic densities can result in a significant number of idle BSs, which implies the waste of power resources. To deal with this problem, we propose an active state control algorithm based on semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) for a heterogeneous network. A MDP in discrete time domain is formulated from continuous domain with some approximation. Suboptimal on-line learning algorithm with a random policy is proposed to solve the problem. We explicitly include coverage constraint so that active cells can provide the same signal to noise ratio (SNR) coverage with a targeted outage rate. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm properly controls the active state depending on traffic densities without increasing the number of handovers excessively while providing average user perceived rate (UPR) in a more power efficient way than a conventional algorithm.