Anticipatory power cycling of mobile network equipment for high demand multimedia traffic

Abstract

The increasing energy demand of mobile phone networks is a problem for the environment and a cost factor for mobile network operators. Multimedia content is increasingly popular, demands high data rates, and increases energy usage of mobile phone networks. Thus it is important to reduce energy usage of mobile phone networks while serving multimedia content with a high quality of experience (QoE). We developed an approach to power-cycle base stations and control the playback of video streams while reducing the energy consumption and not decreasing the QoE for users. We present two implementations: an optimization problem and an iterative algorithm. Up to 80% of energy can be saved by combining power cycling and video stream controlling in low-load situations. With increasing load, the energy consumption also increases while the QoE can still be improved.