oa On green planning and management of cellular networks in urban cities

Energy is becoming a main concern nowadays due to the increasing demands on natural energy resources. Base stations (BS) consume up to 80% of the total energy expenditure in a cellular network. The energy-efficiency of the BSs decreases significantly at off-peak hours since the power amplifiers' energy-efficiency degrades at lower output power. Thus, power savings methods should focus on the access network level by trying to manipulate the BSs power consumption. This could be done by reducing the number of active elements (e.g., BSs) in the network for lower traffic states by switching some BSs off. In this case, network management should allow smooth transition between different network topologies based on the traffic demands. In this work, we evaluate a green radio network planning approach by jointly optimizing the number of active BSs and the BS on/off switching patterns based on the changing traffic conditions in the network in an effort to reduce the total energy consumption of the BSs. Planning is performed based on two approaches: a reactive and a proactive approach. In the proactive approach, planning will be performed starting with the lowest traffic demand until reaching the highest traffic demand whereas in the reactive approach, the reverse way is considered. Performance results are presented for various case studies and evaluated taking into account practical network planning considerations. Moreover, we present real planning results in an urban city environment using the ICS telecom tool from ATDI in order to perform coverage calculations and analysis for LTE networks.