Trading Off Delay and Energy Saving Through Advanced Sleep Modes in 5G RANs

While designed for being energy efficient, the deployment of 5G networks will further increase Radio Access Networks (RANs) energy consumption with the twofold effect to raise sustainability issues and increase operational costs for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). However, the energy waste occurring during low traffic periods can be mitigated through Advanced Sleep Modes (ASMs) that make the BSs enter into progressively deeper and less consuming sleep modes. Deep sleep modes, unfortunately, have longer reactivation times, and may jeopardize service quality. In this paper, focusing on 5G latency requirements in low traffic periods, we propose a framework to dynamically adapt the ASM configuration settings to the actual traffic load so as to meet a desired constraint on the average BS reactivation delay.