Dimensioning network deployment and resource management in green mesh networks

Abstract

In this article, network deployment and resource management issues are revisited in the context of green radio communication networks with sustainable energy supply. It is argued that under the green network paradigm powered by renewable energy, the fundamental design criterion and main performance metric have shifted from energy efficiency to energy sustainability. As an effort to this end, in this article, new network solutions are proposed with an objective of improving network sustainability; the proposed solutions ensure that dynamically harvested energy can sustain the traffic demands in the network. Specifically, the placement issue of green access points (i.e., APs powered by sustainable energy sources) is investigated to meet the energy and QoS demands of mobile users; and an adaptive resource management scheme is proposed to address the unreliability of renewable energy in QoS provisioning. It is shown that by mitigating the energy depletion probability of green APs, sustainable network performance can be significantly improved.