RBS Activation Schemes for Minimum Power Consumption in Mobile Networks

Power consumption costs is a significant component in mobile network operators OPEX and recent research is focusing on energy efficient design and operation of the radio access network to decrease the economic and environmental consequences of operating such a vast number of Radio Base Stations (RBSs). In this work, we formulate the problem of power consumption in mobile networks as an ILP and propose a heuristic to determine the optimal, with respect to power consumption, subset of available RBS that should be active in order to serve a certain load of UEs, without violating QoS requirements for each user served. We exploit the results of this formulation setup and propose RBS activation schemes for network operation with acceptable levels of outage probability for the users. The results indicate that our RBS activation scheme which takes into account RBS coverage overlap achieves significant energy savings compared to ordinary network operation.