Energy saving market for mobile operators

Ensuring seamless coverage accounts for the lion's share of the energy consumed in a mobile network. Overlapping coverage of three to five mobile network operators (MNOs) results in enormous amount of energy waste which is avoidable. The traffic demands of the mobile networks vary significantly throughout the day. As the offered load for all networks are not same at a given time and the differences in energy consumption at different loads are significant, multi-MNO capacity/coverage sharing can dramatically reduce energy consumption of mobile networks and provide the MNOs a cost effective means to cope with the exponential growth of traffic. In this paper, we propose an energy saving market for a multi-MNO network scenario. As the competing MNOs are not comfortable with information sharing, we propose a double auction clearinghouse market mechanism where MNOs sell and buy capacity in order to minimize energy consumption. In our setting, each MNO proposes its bids and asks simultaneously for buying and selling multi-unit capacities respectively to an independent auctioneer, i.e., clearinghouse and ends up either as a buyer or as a seller in each round. We show that the mechanism allows the MNOs to save significant percentage of energy cost throughout a wide range of network load. Different than other energy saving features such as cell sleep or antenna muting which can not be enabled at heavy traffic load, dynamic capacity sharing allows MNOs to handle traffic bursts with energy saving opportunity.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, to be published in ICC 2015 workshop on Next Generation Green IC

Operator and Radio Resource Sharing in Multi-Carrier Environments

Abstract—Today’s mobile networks prevent users from freely accessing all available networks. Instead, seamless network composition could present a win-win situation for both users and operators. Users can gain better quality of service with more resources to choose from, while each individual operator can provision lesser bandwidth since resources can be shared during times of peak demand. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of operator cooperation using real trace data of cellular data access. We leverage the difference in burstiness at small timescales across network providers to shed the peak usage of one operator on to another. Our results show that even when an operator provisions network capacity below the peak load, cooperation with other network providers can help maintain quality of service for most sessions. In addition, we investigate the performance delivered by various kinds of cellular data cards. Our results confirm that WiFi 802.11b/g consistently delivers superior performance compared to 3G. It will take the next generation 4G technologies such as LTE to deliver end-user performance comparable to widely-deployed 802.11 networks. I

Operator and radio resource sharing in multi-carrier environments

A key challenge that the mobile networking world is facing is seamless network composition. In spite of a wide range of available access technologies, the operator agreements prevent users to freely access these networks. With seamless network composition, users can gain better quality of service, and operators can provision less bandwidth by sharing their resources. Al-Fares et al. previously proposed a resource reservation framework that implements this network composition concept. We extended their work by analyzing the benefits of operator cooperation in a realistic environment using their framework. In our scenario, we tried to leverage the difference in burstiness in small timescales to shed the peak usage of one operator onto another. We utilize Swing to reproduce traffic based on the real 3G trace data. The results show that even when the operator's capacities are limited, the cooperation can help maintain quality of service for most sessions. Nevertheless, even if all access technologies can be accessed seamlessly, more challenges appear to be which technology users should use and which combination of access technologies is appropriate to deploy. To provide more insight to these challenges, we investigated the performance delivered by various kinds of wireless technologies. We utilized Swing's abilities to tune the topology parameters to reflect different access technologies. Our results show that WiFi can provide significantly better performance compared to the 3G. On the other hand, we expect the performance of LTE to be comparable to or even better than WiF