Reducing energy consumption in cellular networks by adjusting transmitted power of base stations

Abstract

With the growth of cellular networks and emergence of new technologies, the power consumption of mobile communication networks has become an important and worrying topic that should be taken into consideration in any future cellular evolution. Recently, many solutions were proposed in the literature to reduce the power in cellular communications while maintaining the quality of service, in the purpose of achieving, what is known now as “Green Communications”. In this paper, we are interested in power-efficient methods altering the transmitted power of base stations, especially Sleep Mode and Cell Zooming techniques. After presenting the advantages, drawbacks and implementations of these two green solutions, we will introduce a new algorithm that should be implemented and applied on the base stations to reduce their total power consumption. This algorithm considers several cases including Cell Zooming and combination of Sleep Mode and Cell Zooming depending on the cell loads and mobile distribution. It also computes the power needed in each case and then chooses the most power-efficient scenario. Moreover, we will study the performance and efficacy of implementing our algorithm in some practical cellular network settings.