An overview of energy-efficient base station management techniques

Abstract

Abstract-Cellular networks have been traditionally dimensioned to fulfill the desired quality of service (QoS) requirements at all times, and consequently their deployment has been planned to meet the expected peak of the user demand. However, with the user demand recently increasing at exponential pace, concerns about the cellular networks energy consumption have been raised. In response, energy-efficient resource management schemes have been proposed, which take into account energy consumption, and control how much of the network infrastructure is actually needed at different times, and how much can be temporarily powered off to cut energy consumption. Since most of the energy consumed in cellular networks is used by base stations (BSs), algorithms for managing BSs seem to be the most urgent development to achieve energy-efficient operation. This paper provides a quick overview of the BS management techniques that were recently proposed for cellular networks. In addition, an outlook on real implementation aspects, including current commercial products, and trends in the development of energyefficient hardware is also given.

A Practical Framework for Energy-Efficient Node Activation in Heterogeneous LTE Networks

“…However, switch-on/off operations should be few, for several reasons: first, especially with older equipment, it takes a considerable amount of time before a micro node is fully operational (in the order of tens of seconds or minutes), due to the operating system boot procedure, control and management plane setup operations (e.g., path setup in the Evolved Packet Core network), and so on, and it takes some time to shut it down as well. Second, topology alterations often have unpredictable ripples in a multicell network: a switch-off may cause massive handovers (even when cell wilting is used, [6]), possibly overloading the corresponding macro and affecting nearby macros through a change in the interference pattern. Third, switching operations increase the wear and tear of equipment, hence reducing its MTBF [6].…”

“…Second, topology alterations often have unpredictable ripples in a multicell network: a switch-off may cause massive handovers (even when cell wilting is used, [6]), possibly overloading the corresponding macro and affecting nearby macros through a change in the interference pattern. Third, switching operations increase the wear and tear of equipment, hence reducing its MTBF [6]. For this reason, we assume that an upper bound of 2 ⋅ max switching operations must be enforced on all micro nodes.…”

“…As far as cellular networks are concerned, energy efficiency in LTE networks has been the subject of several studies. Leaving aside those that investigate battery saving at the user side (e.g., [2][3][4]), many works concentrate on the infrastructure side, which is where energy consumption meets OPEX (see, e.g., [5][6][7][8][9] and the references therein and again [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]).…”

“…Most works in the existing literature usually make some assumptions which render their scheme impractical: the first one is that the number of per-node switch operations is unlimited. While we can expect future base stations to be able to tolerate frequent power transitions, most of the ones that are currently operational have not been designed with this characteristic [6]. This means that frequent switches will decrease their energy efficiency and possibly decrease their mean time between failures (MTBF), something that has a significant impact on OPEX.…”

Optimizing LTE wireless access networks towards power consumption and electromagnetic exposure of human beings

“…For the power consumption of a single base station in current wireless access networks, several models are available in literature with all similar results [1,8,9,10]. To reduce power consumption and/or improve energy efficiency in those networks, the introduction of sleep modes [11,12,13,14,15] and small cells [16,17] are topics that are well investigated.…”