Siesta: Software-Defined Energy Efficient Base Station Control for Green Cellular Networks

In order to tackle the issues of mounting deployments and large energy consumption of base stations, it is integral to devise schemes to improve energy efficiency in cellular networks. We propose a virtualized network function of cell management on an SDN architecture. We develop a cell management algorithm on the architecture that can effectively control the sleep and awake modes of base stations and perform handover operations in a cellular network. It provides significant benefits over current cellular networks that suffer from inflexible management and complex control. Our extensive trace-driven evaluation results show that the proposed control architecture and the cell management algorithm achieve significant energy savings, and incur less control message exchanges, more cells in a sleep mode for longer durations, and less cell status changes than existing energy saving approaches for cellular networks.