Green cellular network: Deployment solutions, sensitivity and tradeoffs

A prominent challenge faced by the communication industry and society is the reduction of energy consumption. How the cellular network can maintain a quality of service (QoS), whilst decreasing its operational energy is investigated from both a deployment and scheduling perspective. This paper presents results showing the dominant factors which reduce the radio access network (RAN) energy consumption and point the way for future research. A large proportion of energy consumption is due to the static overhead power of base-stations and the paper considers sleep mode operation as a solution for a variety of network conditions. Furthermore, a significant contributor to transmission inefficiency is due to the performance of cell edge users. The paper proposes a vertical sector antenna deployment scheme and demonstrate that our proposals can yield significant operational energy and transmission efficiency savings, as well as insight into the tradeoff relationship between energy consumption and network performance. Furthermore, the paper also gives a comprehensive performance sensitivity analysis, which yields insight into both the validity of results and the parameters which can significantly influence future development.