Sustainable management of LTE networks

We consider the main costs and gains for the management of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular network exploiting e-NodeB (eNB) Sleep Mode (SM). More in depth, we develop an algorithm, called EURA, that is able to target a sustainability metric. The sustainability of the system takes into account the costs of energy consumed by active eNBs, the costs for repairing an eNB when it fails (as a consequence of power state changes), and the utility gain derived from increasing the Quality of Service (QoS) of users. We evaluate our solution on a realistic scenario. Our results show that EURA outperforms previous algorithms focusing solely on the energy costs or on the reparation ones. Moreover, EURA is able to wisely adapt to different network conditions, i.e., when the reparation costs tend to increase.