Design and operation of energy efficient heterogeneous mobile networks

During the last two decades we have witnessed a rapid growth in wireless communication services, which has dramatically increased the number of necessary radio access components to provide the adequate capacity and acceptable quality of service. The power cost for operating this huge number of radio Base Stations (BSs) is under serious consideration by the mobile communication industry and recent research efforts have focused on energy efficient design and optimization of the radio access network in order to alleviate the energy consumption and mobile network operators OPEX. In this work, we consider a deployment of heterogeneous BSs to serve a given geographical area and propose two energy-aware algorithms to optimally determine the operational mode of those BSs under various traffic load conditions. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed algorithms can provide near optimal solutions and achieve substantial network energy consumption reduction without compromising the efficient operation of the mobile network. We further benefit from the outcome of this formulation framework and propose BS activation schemes that yield proper BS activation profiles for continuous-time operation in the same network deployment. Various traffic loads are investigated in several simulation campaigns and our proposed schemes yield quite satisfactory energy saving gains compared to fully operational topology networks in all scenarios of interest examined.