The role of the Information and Communication Technology sector on productivity and economic growth is constantly increasing and, due to its pervasiveness, the ICT power consumption can no longer be ignored. Some energy-aware models and approaches have already been proposed for cellular networks, they aim at reducing power expenditures while decreasing network operators costs. However, the focus is on management issues such as switching on and off network elements based on traffic levels, not on considering that an effective energy-efficient operation largely depends on the decisions taken at the design stages. To fill this gap, we propose a joint design and management optimization approach, which tries to limit energy consumption while guaranteeing connection quality constraints for every user and minimizes operators Capex and Opex. We show that including energy costs in Opex and taking into account energy management strategies at the design stages produce more energy efficient and versatile topologies than when Capex only is considered.
Citation
unpublished Politecnico di Milano technical report Ecole Politecnique de Montreal technical report