Downlink power control for latency aware grid energy savings in green cellular networks

Abstract

Mobile service providers can achieve cost savings by deploying Base Stations (BSs) which harvest renewable energy as they reduce the energy drawn from the grid and its associated cost. The cost savings can be further enhanced by careful management of the system resources. Furthermore, mobile operators require that such resource management be carefully coupled with managing the quality of service (QoS) to ensure customer satisfaction. This process involves trade-off between energy drawn from the grid and the QoS performance. In contrast to prior research which has addressed the problem of joint management of grid energy savings and the QoS performance using user-association reconfiguration or BS on/off schemes, we present a framework for doing so using BS downlink power control. Our proposed framework is evaluated through simulations using a real BS deployment from London, UK, and we show its superior performance over existing benchmarks. We demonstrate that our framework can lead to around 40% grid energy savings with better network latency performance as compared to the traditionally used scheme.