An overview of energy-efficient base station management techniques

Cellular networks have been traditionally dimensioned to fulfill the desired quality of service (QoS) requirements at all times, and consequently their deployment has been planned to meet the expected peak of the user demand. However, with the user demand recently increasing at exponential pace, concerns about the cellular networks energy consumption have been raised. In response, energy-efficient resource management schemes have been proposed, which take into account energy consumption, and control how much of the network infrastructure is actually needed at different times, and how much can be temporarily powered off to cut energy consumption. Since most of the energy consumed in cellular networks is used by base stations (BSs), algorithms for managing BSs seem to be the most urgent development to achieve energy-efficient operation. This paper provides a quick overview of the BS management techniques that were recently proposed for cellular networks. In addition, an outlook on real implementation aspects, including current commercial products, and trends in the development of energy-efficient hardware is also given.