Green Optimization Schemes for Mobile Network Design and Operation

Abstract

Mobile telecommunication’s operation power cost occupies a large portion in network operators OPEX list. Recent research efforts on energy efficient design and optimization of the radio access network focus on applicable solutions that decrease the energy consumption of the vast number of radio base stations (BSs), mostly because of the economic and environmental consequences of their operation. In this work, we formulate the power consumption optimization problem in mobile networks and propose two energy efficient heuristic schemes to determine the optimal subset of available BSs that should be active in order to serve a certain load of UEs, without violating QoS requirements for each user served. We exploit the results of this formulation setup and further propose a BS activation scheme to produce proper BS activation profiles for continuous time operation in the same network deployment under various user traffic demands. The results indicate that our proposed BS optimization and activation schemes achieve significant energy savings compared to ordinary network operation