• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.5449-5464
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• 2018

Recent works have validated the possibility of reducing the energy consumption in wireless heterogeneous networks, achieved by switching on/off some base stations (BSs) dynamically. In this paper, to realize energy conservation, the discrete time Markov Decision Process (DTMDP) is developed to match up the BS switching operations with the traffic load variations. Then, an asynchronous decision-making algorithm, which is based on the Bellman equation and the on/off priorities of the BSs, is firstly put forward and proved to be optimal in this paper. Through reducing the state and action space during one decision, the proposed asynchronous algorithm can avoid the "curse of dimensionality" occurred in DTMDP frequently. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed asynchronous on/off strategies.