Network Sharing to Enable Sustainable Communications in the Era of 5G and Beyond

The transition towards the era of 5G and beyond is currently fostered by the extensive penetration of extremely demanding communication services, characterized by the need for exchanging increasingly larger traffic volumes with tight throughput and latency constraints. Nevertheless, the consequent massive densification of radio access networks (RANs) entails remarkable sustainability concerns, related to the staggering increase of energy demand and to the costly deployment of new infrastructure that, being dimensioned for future peak demands, may result underutilized for long periods of time. Furthermore, new potential vulnerabilities emerge that may impair the provisioning of resilient communication services. In this context, sharing network resources among different mobile operators (MOs) may play a key role to improve energy efficiency and to enhance resilience of future mobile networks. We hence investigate the potential benefits derived from the sharing of network infrastructure (primarily Base Stations with their portion of spectrum) among different MOs, comparing different areas, from a urban densely populated environment to a rural region. Based on real mobile traffic data, we design data-driven strategies to dynamically offload traffic among Base Stations owned by different MOs, allowing the switch off of unneeded resources. Our results shows that network sharing (NS) is effective in achieving huge energy saving and significant reduction of the electricity bill. Furthermore, proper configuration settings of the offloading strategies allow to trade off between sustainability goals and Quality of Service, hence enabling a feasible deployment of 5G scenarios and a sustainable evolution towards 6G.