On balancing energy efficiency for network operators and mobile users in dynamic planning

Abstract

The high energy consumption of network operators and mobile users has raised environmental, financial, and quality-of-experience concerns. These concerns have renewed the research efforts in developing green communication strategies for energy efficient wireless network operation. Network operators employ dynamic planning to save energy at low call traffic load by switching off some of their base stations (BSs), and mobile users are served by the remaining active BSs. The existing research investigates energy efficiency of dynamic planning approaches only from the network operator perspective. Dynamic planning, if not carefully designed, can lead to higher energy consumption for the mobile users in the uplink, which in turn degrades the uplink service quality due to mobile terminals' battery depletion. In this article we propose a dynamic planning framework with balanced energy efficiency that accounts for the energy consumption of the mobile users in the uplink as well as that of the network operators in the downlink. We discuss the associated challenges and implementation issues. A dynamic planning approach based on a multi-time scale decision process is proposed to achieve the balanced energy efficiency framework. Numerical results demonstrate the improved energy efficiency performance for the uplink mobile users as compared with the traditional dynamic planning approach.