Energy-Efficient Wireless Cellular Communications through Network Resource Dynamic Adaptation

Abstract

Cellular networks represent one of the major energy consumers of communication networks and their contribution to the global carbon footprint and energy consumption continuously and rapidly increases. Improving energy efficiency of the cellular access networks become an important requirement and has recently gained considerable attention of the research community and operators. In this paper, improving cellular networks energy efficiency through dynamic adaptation of network resources is presented with foundations which justify practical realization of such approach. Paper gives insight into how the traffic pattern variations and transmitted power scaling influence on the instantaneous power consumption of the base stations. Also, impact of the base stations Tx power on two prominent energy efficiency metrics of the cellular access network is discussed. Results of a proposed optimization approach which is based on dynamic adaptation of the base stations on/off activity and the transmitted power in accordance with the spatial and temporal variations of traffic are presented. According to obtained results, dynamic adaptation of network resources can offer significant monthly energy savings on the level of complete cellular access network.