Towards an Energy Management Framework for Carrier-Grade Wireless Back-Haul Networks

Rural regions all over the world often suffer from similar problems in terms of (broadband) connectivity to communication infrastructures. Sparsely populated areas and large distances render desirable roll out of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems economically unfeasible for operators. Particularly in rural regions in developing or emerging areas such as Africa with a lack of communication infrastructure often also the lack of a stable power grid comes along which obviously imposes another challenge on any ICT system considered to be deployed. Energy-saving nodes allowing using batteries and e.g. solar panels are as much essential as protocols and mechanisms which can deal with more frequent node failures and are, though, able to provide a reliable network. In this paper we first show that our Wireless Back-haul (WiBACK) architecture is capable of providing carrier-grade services using cost-effective 'off-the-shelf' hardware. We than identify the limitations of WiBACK with respect to energy-awareness of the system and draft a concept presenting the required enhancements in the architecture to become energy-aware.