. In a world of continuous growth of economies and global population eco-sustainability is of outmost relevance. Especially, mobile broadband networks are facing an exponential growing traffic volume and so the sustainability of these networks comes into focus. The recently completed European funded Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project EARTH has studied the impact of traffic growth on mobile broadband network energy consumption and carbon footprint, pioneering this field. This chapter summarizes the key insights of EARTH on questions like "How does the exploding traffic impact the sustainability?", "How can energy efficiency be rated and predicted?", "What are the key solutions to improve the energy efficiency and how to efficiently integrate such solutions?" The results are representing the foundation of the maturing scientific engineering discipline of Energy Efficient Wireless Access, targeting the standardisation in IETF and 3GPP, strongly influencing academic research trends, and will soon be reflected in products and deployments of the European telecommunications industry.
Abstract. Nowadays, energy efficiency has become a major issue in mobile networks operation. Due to the exponential rise in the number of wireless Internet-connected mobile devices reducing electrical energy consumption is not only a matter of showing environmental responsibility, but also of substantially reducing their operational expenditure. However, energy reduction cannot be pursued at any cost and appropriate service has to be supported. Among the diverse hardware and software solutions available, this paper focuses on the dynamic operation of cellular base stations, in which redundant base stations are switched off during periods of low traffic. Besides, we are also describing the use of prediction mechanisms in order to make a proper decision on when to take that action. The proposed schemes are assessed by means simulations using both theoretical and real load models.
Energy efficiency is one of main challenges for the evolution of mobile networks. Many solutions have been already proposed by literature studies, and one promising technique is given by selective switch OFF schemes applied to booster cells in presence of a coverage layer. This mechanism permits to save energy by dynamically switching off redundant cells in conditions of low traffic, while maintaining the minimum QoS requested in the network. Nevertheless, in order to evaluate the real gains achievable by the operator in terms of decrease in energy consumption, these theoretical solutions should be implemented in a real network; from this point of view, ON-OFF algorithms in literature often result not suitable for a real implementation because of practical constraints and hardware capabilities of commercial equipment. The real performances of a selective switch OFF scheme have been assessed in a test bench with real eNodeB LTE in an opportune scenario of interest and with commercial terminals. Achieved gains obtained in high traffic conditions are encouraging also to open research activity in order to have future sustainable mobile communication systems.Index Terms-energy efficiency, mobile network, selective switching OFF schemes, 3GPP LTE, test bench, QoS.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.