Reducing Power Consumption in C-RAN Using Switch On/Off of MC-RRH Sectors and Small Cells

Narjes Lassoued,Noureddine Boujnah,Ridha Bouallegue

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3081690

Narjes Lassoued, Noureddine Boujnah + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3081690

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Abstract

The evolution toward 5G wireless networks was the result of an exponential growth in data traffic demands and a significant increase in the number of connected devices with stringent quality of services (QoS) requirements. This evolution leads to an increase in the total power consumption and indirectly produces pollution intensive carbon footprints. To overcome 5G challenges in traffic demands and power consumption, Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture is introduced. This paper investigates the energy consumption in 5G C-RAN using switch on/off cell sectors and densification by exploiting Small Cell Remote Radio Heads (SC-RRHs). We develop sector switch on/off algorithms based on reducing the number of underutilized sectors per Macro Cell RRH (MC-RRH). Then, we apply a selective SC-RRHs distribution allowing SC-RRHs to serve users of switched off sectors. Simulations results show that our proposed approaches based on the switch on/off by sector can achieve more than 55% of power saving which makes them more efficient than those based on the switch on/off by cell in terms of power saving.

Highlights

Focusing on maintaining an acceptable quality of service (QoS), we propose a selective distribution of Small Cell Remote Radio Heads (SC-Remote Radio Heads (RRHs)) within the whole Macro Cell RRH (MC-RRH) area in order to serve the turned off sector users
We are interested by the radio part of cloud RAN topology which is composed by Nmc = 7 MC-RRHs
In this paper, we have investigated the power consumption problem in 5G Cloud RAN architecture based on sectorized MC-RRHs and densified SC-RRHs deploying uniform and nonuniform assignment of users

Summary

Introduction

The 5G network serves between 10 to 100 times more number of cellular devices compared to previous generation [2]. This leads to a growth in mobile data traffic demands. Thereby, the amount of mobile data traffic is estimated to reach 77.5 Exabyte per month in 2022 [3] To accommodate this significant increase in the number of connected devices and the exponential growth of data traffic demands, technologies such as: millimeter wave (mmwave), massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), beamforming, new sophisticated radio access techniques, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and small

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Results

Conclusion