Predictive green wireless access: exploiting mobility and application information

The ever increasing mobile data traffic and dense deployment of wireless networks have made energy efficient radio access imperative. As networks are designed to satisfy peak user demands, radio access energy can be reduced in a number of ways at times of lower demand. This includes putting base stations (BSs) to intermittent short sleep modes during low load, as well as adaptively powering down select BSs completely where demand is low for prolonged time periods. In order to fully exploit such energy conserving mechanisms, networks should be aware of the user temporal and spatial traffic demands. To this end, this article investigates the potential of utilizing predictions of user location and application information as a means to energy saving. We discuss the development of a predictive green wireless access (PreGWA) framework and identify its key functional entities and their interaction. To demonstrate the potential energy savings we then provide a case study on stored video streaming and illustrate how exploiting predictions can minimize BS resource consumption within a single cell, and across a network of cells. Finally, to emphasize the practical potential of PreGWA, we present a distributed heuristic that reduces resource consumption significantly without requiring considerable information or signaling overhead.