Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks, explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogeneous network deployment based on micro, pico and femto-cells can be used to achieve this goal. Since cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a "green" cellular network technologyComment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Control-data separation architecture for cellular radio access networks: a survey and outlook

Conventional cellular systems are designed to ensure ubiquitous coverage with an always present wireless channel irrespective of the spatial and temporal demand of service. This approach raises several problems due to the tight coupling between network and data access points, as well as the paradigm shift towards data-oriented services, heterogeneous deployments and network densification. A logical separation between control and data planes is seen as a promising solution that could overcome these issues, by providing data services under the umbrella of a coverage layer. This article presents a holistic survey of existing literature on the control-data separation architecture (CDSA) for cellular radio access networks. As a starting point, we discuss the fundamentals, concepts, and general structure of the CDSA. Then, we point out limitations of the conventional architecture in futuristic deployment scenarios. In addition, we present and critically discuss the work that has been done to investigate potential benefits of the CDSA, as well as its technical challenges and enabling technologies. Finally, an overview of standardisation proposals related to this research vision is provided

Separation Framework: An Enabler for Cooperative and D2D Communication for Future 5G Networks

Soaring capacity and coverage demands dictate that future cellular networks need to soon migrate towards ultra-dense networks. However, network densification comes with a host of challenges that include compromised energy efficiency, complex interference management, cumbersome mobility management, burdensome signaling overheads and higher backhaul costs. Interestingly, most of the problems, that beleaguer network densification, stem from legacy networks' one common feature i.e., tight coupling between the control and data planes regardless of their degree of heterogeneity and cell density. Consequently, in wake of 5G, control and data planes separation architecture (SARC) has recently been conceived as a promising paradigm that has potential to address most of aforementioned challenges. In this article, we review various proposals that have been presented in literature so far to enable SARC. More specifically, we analyze how and to what degree various SARC proposals address the four main challenges in network densification namely: energy efficiency, system level capacity maximization, interference management and mobility management. We then focus on two salient features of future cellular networks that have not yet been adapted in legacy networks at wide scale and thus remain a hallmark of 5G, i.e., coordinated multipoint (CoMP), and device-to-device (D2D) communications. After providing necessary background on CoMP and D2D, we analyze how SARC can particularly act as a major enabler for CoMP and D2D in context of 5G. This article thus serves as both a tutorial as well as an up to date survey on SARC, CoMP and D2D. Most importantly, the article provides an extensive outlook of challenges and opportunities that lie at the crossroads of these three mutually entangled emerging technologies.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 201

Robust Schemes to Enhance Energy Consumption Efficiency for Millimeter Wave-Based Microcellular Network in Congested Urban Environments

Future wireless communication networks will be largely characterized by small cell deployments, typically on the order of 200 meters of radius/cell, at most. Meanwhile, recent studies show that base stations (BS) account for about 80 to 95 % of the total network power. This simply implies that more energy will be consumed in the future wireless network since small cell means massive deployment of BS. This phenomenon makes energy-efficient (EE) control a central issue of critical consideration in the design of future wireless networks. This paper proposes and investigates (the performance of) two different energy-saving approaches namely, adaptive-sleep sectorization (AS), adaptive hybrid partitioning schemes (AH) for small cellular networks using smart antenna technique. We formulated a generic base-model for the above-mentioned schemes and applied the spatial Poisson process to reduce the system complexity and to improve flexibility in the beam angle reconfiguration of the adaptive antenna, also known as a smart antenna (SA). The SA uses the scalable algorithms to track active users in different segments/sectors of the microcell, making the proposed schemes capable of targeting specific users or groups of users in periods of sparse traffic, and capable of performing optimally when the network is highly congested. The capabilities of the proposed smart/adaptive antenna approaches can be easily adapted and integrated into the massive MIMO for future deployment. Rigorous numerical analysis at different orders of sectorization shows that among the proposed schemes, the AH strategy outperforms the AS in terms of energy saving by about 52 %. Generally, the proposed schemes have demonstrated the ability to significantly increase the power consumption efficiency of micro base stations for future generation cellular systems, over the traditional design methodologies

User Association in 5G Networks: A Survey and an Outlook

26 pages; accepted to appear in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

ENERGY-EFFICIENT DESIGN OF HETEROGENEOUS CELLULAR NETWORKS USING STOCHASTIC GEOMETRY

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH