Sleep mode management in cellular networks: a traffic based technique enabling energy saving

Abstract

Because of the environmental policies that pursue a significant reduction of global greenhouse gas and to the ambition of the network operators to keep under control operational and maintenance expenditures, energy efficiency has recently become one of the most relevant issues for present and future research activities. This contribution deals with the management of the base station sleep mode in a cellular network. The forecasting based sleep mode algorithm, justified by daily and weekly periodic behaviour of traffic, is presented and evaluated for general deployments of second and third generation cellular networks. The energy consumption of each base station and the area power consumption are the metrics, which are considered for our simulations. The results show a significant increase of the energy efficiency during low traffic periods with respect to the usual scenario, thanks to the adoption of the proposed strategy. The forecasting based sleep mode algorithm has been also compared with a strategy based on real‐time measurements and the results show similar performances while the number of updates of the network configuration and the global complexity are decreased. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Energy-Saving Management Mechanism Based on Hybrid Energy Supplies for LTE Heterogeneous Networks

“…Here traffic is taken as the load factor in (4). There are many traffic prediction methods which have been used in BS sleep methods, such as Holt-Winters in [11] and online stochastic game theoretic algorithm in [20]. But they are not suitable for traffic with small value and the accuracy can be improved.…”

“…However, they do not consider coverage and interference control from user perspectives. Additionally, methods in [11,12] mainly discuss BS sleep gains from the point of traffic prediction Beyond sleep mode techniques, renewable energy supplies are another approach for saving energy of power grid. In [13], dynamic renewable energy allocation methods with minimal online power are investigated.…”

Energy efficient RRM strategies for current and upcoming TeTRA cellular systems

“…• frequency domain strategies adapting the available bandwidth to traffic variations by playing with carriers activation and deactivation like in [4] and [5]; • spatial domain strategies adapting the number of antennas at the base station in a MIMO scenario like in [6] or playing with the number of active micro base stations in a heterogeneous scenario like in [7]; • time domain strategies that allow a low power state for the RF stage of the base station during period of no transmission [8].…”

Improving cellular network energy efficiency by joint management of sleep mode and transmission power

“…The key of this strategy is the use of traffic forecast in order to allow the base stations to know the traffic behaviour in their coverage area. The aptness of forecast for cellular traffic has been already considered in [22] and [23]; moreover, its application in the energy efficiency maximisation has been used to introduce cell sleep mode: in particular in [24] authors apply compressed sensing technique while in [25] and [26] the exponential smoothing technique is evaluated. In both cases when forecasted traffic is low some radio resources are switched to the sleep mode to save energy.…”

“…With respect to these previous works, the strategy proposed in this paper can be considered an improvement which use the traffic prevision to jointly introduce sleep mode at micro cell level and adapting the maximum transmission power at macro cell level. As highlighted in [26], the forecast approach requires a lower number of switch on/off operations with respect to the procedure which is based on istantaneous traffic measurements; as a result, the control traffic and handover operations are also reduced.…”