ABSTRACT
The last decade witnessed an astronomical growth in the demand for wireless access. The earlier predominant service was mobile telephony, but with the rapid development of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, the focus of wireless access has progressively been shifted to mobile Internet due to driving force applications such as Facebook, Google Suite, and YouTube, to name a few. Some recent statistics [1] have revealed that (1) in the first half of 2014 the number of smartphones in use has surpassed the number of PCs accessing web services; and (2) the ICT data traffic is expected to drastically increase by about 1000-fold by 2020, with an annual growth rate of 66% [2], and this increasing demand will quickly drain the scarce radio resources. As new applications emerge on a daily basis, the number of mobile users will continue to augment, leading to potential challenges for mobile network operators (MNOs) in terms of achieving the delivery of their services with appropriate quality of service (QoS) while at the same time maintaining an acceptable level of energy consumption resulting from their operations.
