Energy-aware Topology Management for 5G dual-hop ultra-high capacity backhaul networks exploiting path diversity

This paper addresses an energy efficient network topology management strategy which exploits the path diversity in a dual-hop backhaul network in order to lessen the power consumption by switching as many underutilized base stations as possible to a dormant mode. This scheme dynamically tunes the various states of the relay nodes and aggregation points in a dual-hop setup to meet a trade-off between Quality of Service (QoS) and energy expense. It is shown that topology management is able to notably reduce the energy consumption by up to 75% at low traffic levels. In addition, the QoS can be improved by up to 45% by mitigating the bottleneck from the second hop using different combinations of path diversity in the network. Furthermore, the path diversity is analysed using directed graph for this dual-hop backhaul scenarios where the traffic load varies both in time and spatial domains.