Practical energy-saving in 3G femtocells

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An Energy-efficient Rate Adaptive Media Access Protocol (RA-MAC) for Long-lived Sensor Networks

We introduce an energy-efficient Rate Adaptive Media Access Control (RA-MAC) algorithm for long-lived Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Previous research shows that the dynamic and lossy nature of wireless communications is one of the major challenges to reliable data delivery in WSNs. RA-MAC achieves high link reliability in such situations by dynamically trading off data rate for channel gain. The extra gain that can be achieved reduces the packet loss rate which contributes to reduced energy expenditure through a reduced numbers of retransmissions. We achieve this at the expense of raw bit rate which generally far exceeds the application’s link requirement. To minimize communication energy consumption, RA-MAC selects the optimal data rate based on the estimated link quality at each data rate and an analytical model of the energy consumption. Our model shows how the selected data rate depends on different channel conditions in order to minimize energy consumption. We have implemented RA-MAC in TinyOS for an off-the-shelf sensor platform (the TinyNode) on top of a state-of-the-art WSN Media Access Control Protocol, SCP-MAC, and evaluated its performance by comparing our implementation with the original SCP-MAC using both simulation and experiment

Energy Efficient Nano Servers Provisioning for Information Piece Delivery in a Vehicular Environment

In this paper, we propose energy efficient Information Piece Delivery (IPD) through Nano Servers (NSs) in a vehicular network. Information pieces may contain any data that needs to be communicated to a vehicle. The available power (renewable or non-renewable) for a NS is variable. As a result, the service rate of a NS varies linearly with the available energy within a given range. Our proposed system therefore exhibits energy aware rate adaptation (RA), which uses variable transmission energy. We have also developed another transmission energy saving method for comparison, where sleep cycles (SC) are employed. Both methods are compared against an acceptable download time. To reduce the operational energy, we first optimise the locations of the NSs by developing a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model, which takes into account the hourly variation of the traffic. The model is validated through a Genetic Algorithm (GA1). Furthermore, to reduce the gross delay over the entire vehicular network, the available renewable energy (wind farm) is optimally allocated to each NS according to piece demand. This, in turn, also reduces the network carbon footprint. A Genetic Algorithm (GA2) is also developed to validate the MILP results associated with this system. Through transmission energy savings, RA and SC further reduce the NSs energy consumption by 19% and 18% respectively, however at the expense of higher download time. MILP model 4 (with RA) and model 5 (with SC) reduced the delay by 81% and 83% respectively, while minimising the carbon footprint by 96% and 98% respectively, compared to the initial MILP model

Sleep-Enabled Roadside Units for Motorway Vehicular Networks

In this paper, we introduce a number of generic sleep mechanisms for energy saving at the vehicular roadside units (RSUs). Since random sleep cycles (sleep cycles type-I) were already introduced before, we term the introduced mechanisms sleep cycles (type-II, III, IV, V, VI). Each sleep cycles type arranges the service and sleep sequences distinctively to yield various levels of energy savings and average packet delay. A generic analytic model for the roadside unit (RSU) with such sleep cycles is proposed using G/G/1/K G-vacation queuing, where real vehicular traffic profiles and packet size measurements are utilised. The performance evaluation reveals that with one of the proposed sleep cycles (type-IV), the RSU achieves 68% energy savings and 7.3 ms average packet delay over the day, resulting in respective improvements of 10% and 28% compared to the existing random sleep cycles. These improvements have been achieved under a very conservative operating delay bound for audio conferencing applications. However, modern compression and codecs, due to their leniency on Quality of Service (QoS), would potentially enable higher energy savings through the proposed sleep cycles

Reliability and quality of service of an off-grid wind powered roadside unit in a motorway vehicular environment

Wind-powered base stations and roadside units have been considered as a cost effective greening solution in windy countries which also have limited solar irradiation. The practicality of such a system increases significantly in sparse areas such as countryside and motorways. The deployment of standalone off-grid wind powered roadside units could alleviate the common issues related to grid connected renewable energy farms. Hence, there is need to study the feasibility of an off-grid wind powered roadside unit for seamless connectivity. Unlike the conventional usage of reliability analysis of fault-tolerant systems, in this paper, reliability is redefined in the context of availability of intermittent wind for powering a roadside unit (RSU) in a UK motorway vehicular environment. Transient analysis of energy consumption (energy demand) of the RSU and harnessed wind energy are carried out along with real measurements for developing respective generic energy models. Further, a generalised methodology is developed to determine the minimum battery size for achieving a certain reliability standard and quality of service. Several reliability indices such as loss of load probability (LOLP), loss of load expectation (LOLE), energy index of reliability (EIR), mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to recovery (MTTR), forced outage rate (FOR), etc. are obtained for the RSU. The performance results reveal that with a standard micro-turbine and a reasonably small battery, an RSU achieves a good reliability of 99.9% with significant improvement in the quality of service