A Green Traffic Steering Solution for Next Generation Communication Networks

Abstract

In recent years, green communications and networks have drawn increasing attention from researchers and relevant industries owing to their economic and environmental benefits. In mobile networks, base stations (BSs) account for 56% of network power consumption. Hence, using green technologies in base stations would have a considerable impact on service providers' energy bills. Consequently, researchers have investigated various green communication techniques. In this paper, we introduce a new traffic steering technique for energy conservation in next generation communication networks. By leveraging spectrum-based cell zooming techniques, the long-term evolution licensed assisted access (LTE-LAA) concept and software defined radio technology, we introduce a green traffic-steering framework that endeavors to minimize overall network on-grid power consumption and maximize aggregated throughput. Considering the time complexity of the optimum solution, we also propose a heuristic solution. We examine the proposed solution against existing solutions, and our obtained results show that the proposed framework saves up to 15% of on-grid power and increases aggregated throughput by 23%.