Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
The traditional mobile cellular networks are often designed so that a base station (BS) is always under uninterrupted working condition without considering the dynamic nature of user traffic, which results in an inefficient usage of energy. How to improve the system energy efficiency in order to achieve green networking is our major concern in this chapter. Beginning with a comprehensive review of the related works in literature, we introduce a self-organized BS virtual small networking (VSN) protocol so as to adaptively manage BSs' working states based on heterogeneity of user traffic changing in space and time. Motivated by the fact that low-traffic areas can apply a more aggressive BS-off strategy than hotspots, the proposed method is targeted at dividing BSs into groups with some similarity measurements so that the BS-off strategy can be performed more efficiently. Numerical results show that our proposals can save energy consumption on the entire cellular network to a great extent.
Introduction
As demand increases for more energy-efficient technologies in wireless networks, to tackle critical issues such as boosting cost on power consumption and excessive greenhouse gas emissions, the concept of green networking has drawn great attention in recent years. In fact, during the last decades, people have witnessed that the carbon footprint of the telecommunications industry has been exponentially growing due to the explosive rise of service requirements and subscribers’ demands. The concern on reducing power consumption comes from both environmental and economical reasons. With respect to the environment, the information and communications technology (ICT) industry is responsible for approximately 2% of current global electricity demands, with 6% yearly growth in ICT-related carbon dioxide emission (CO2-e) forecast till 2020 [1]. With respect to economics, the power consumption for operating a typical base station (BS), which needs to be connected to the electrical grid, may cost approximately $3,000/year, while off-grid BSs, generally running on diesel power generators in remote areas, may cost ten times more [2]. As more than 120,000 new BSs are deployed annually [3], there is still no end in sight for the development of mobile communications with a large amount of new subscribers and a constant desire for upgrading user equipment from 2G to 3G, and then to 4G.
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