Fluid capacity for energy saving management in multi-layer ultra-dense 4G/5G cellular networks

Abstract

There is a major demand for reducing energy consumption in mobile networks and it is expected become even more vital in the future (5G) multi-layer Ultra Dense Networks (UDNs), in which the number and density of cells in the different layers will grow dramatically. In these networks, multiple geographically overlapping layers are deployed to increase the capacity and throughput, but also increasing the energy consumption. In this paper we present an end-to-end solution that manages energy saving mechanisms in order to scale the provided capacity to the traffic. Assuming a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) deployment, the solution dynamically selects cells to activate and/or deactivate considering the prevailing network load and the expected spectral efficiency of those cells. Evaluation in a small HetNet scenario showed that the proposed solution is able to reduce the energy consumption by more than 30%.