1,059 research outputs found
Self-Sustaining Caching Stations: Towards Cost-Effective 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks
In this article, we investigate the cost-effective 5G-enabled vehicular
networks to support emerging vehicular applications, such as autonomous
driving, in-car infotainment and location-based road services. To this end,
self-sustaining caching stations (SCSs) are introduced to liberate on-road base
stations from the constraints of power lines and wired backhauls. Specifically,
the cache-enabled SCSs are powered by renewable energy and connected to core
networks through wireless backhauls, which can realize "drop-and-play"
deployment, green operation, and low-latency services. With SCSs integrated, a
5G-enabled heterogeneous vehicular networking architecture is further proposed,
where SCSs are deployed along roadside for traffic offloading while
conventional macro base stations (MBSs) provide ubiquitous coverage to
vehicles. In addition, a hierarchical network management framework is designed
to deal with high dynamics in vehicular traffic and renewable energy, where
content caching, energy management and traffic steering are jointly
investigated to optimize the service capability of SCSs with balanced power
demand and supply in different time scales. Case studies are provided to
illustrate SCS deployment and operation designs, and some open research issues
are also discussed.Comment: IEEE Communications Magazine, to appea
Energy sustainable paradigms and methods for future mobile networks: A survey
In this survey, we discuss the role of energy in the design of future mobile
networks and, in particular, we advocate and elaborate on the use of energy
harvesting (EH) hardware as a means to decrease the environmental footprint of
5G technology. To take full advantage of the harvested (renewable) energy,
while still meeting the quality of service required by dense 5G deployments,
suitable management techniques are here reviewed, highlighting the open issues
that are still to be solved to provide eco-friendly and cost-effective mobile
architectures. Several solutions have recently been proposed to tackle
capacity, coverage and efficiency problems, including: C-RAN, Software Defined
Networking (SDN) and fog computing, among others. However, these are not
explicitly tailored to increase the energy efficiency of networks featuring
renewable energy sources, and have the following limitations: (i) their energy
savings are in many cases still insufficient and (ii) they do not consider
network elements possessing energy harvesting capabilities. In this paper, we
systematically review existing energy sustainable paradigms and methods to
address points (i) and (ii), discussing how these can be exploited to obtain
highly efficient, energy self-sufficient and high capacity networks. Several
open issues have emerged from our review, ranging from the need for accurate
energy, transmission and consumption models, to the lack of accurate data
traffic profiles, to the use of power transfer, energy cooperation and energy
trading techniques. These challenges are here discussed along with some
research directions to follow for achieving sustainable 5G systems.Comment: Accepted by Elsevier Computer Communications, 21 pages, 9 figure
On the Tradeoff between Energy Harvesting and Caching in Wireless Networks
Self-powered, energy harvesting small cell base stations (SBS) are expected
to be an integral part of next-generation wireless networks. However, due to
uncertainties in harvested energy, it is necessary to adopt energy efficient
power control schemes to reduce an SBSs' energy consumption and thus ensure
quality-of-service (QoS) for users. Such energy-efficient design can also be
done via the use of content caching which reduces the usage of the
capacity-limited SBS backhaul. of popular content at SBS can also prove
beneficial in this regard by reducing the backhaul usage. In this paper, an
online energy efficient power control scheme is developed for an energy
harvesting SBS equipped with a wireless backhaul and local storage. In our
model, energy arrivals are assumed to be Poisson distributed and the popularity
distribution of requested content is modeled using Zipf's law. The power
control problem is formulated as a (discounted) infinite horizon dynamic
programming problem and solved numerically using the value iteration algorithm.
Using simulations, we provide valuable insights on the impact of energy
harvesting and caching on the energy and sum-throughput performance of the SBS
as the network size is varied. Our results also show that the size of cache and
energy harvesting equipment at the SBS can be traded off, while still meeting
the desired system performance.Comment: To be presented at the IEEE International Conference on
Communications (ICC), London, U.K., 201
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