LTE radio network planning with green considerations.

Abstract

The recent trend towards energy-efficient and environment-aware network operations has mandated the development of novel green network planning paradigms. Energy is becoming a main concern nowadays due to the increasing demands on natural energy resources. Base stations (BS) consume up to 80percent of the total energy expenditure in a cellular network. Previous works focused on techniques such as discontinuous BS transmission, BS sleep modes, and BS on-off switching after complete network deployment. In this thesis, we propose and evaluate a proactive green radio network planning approach that jointly optimizes base station locations and generates the BS on-off switching patterns based on the changing traffic conditions in the network. In this thesis, we formulate the radio network planning problem with green considerations as an integer optimization problem. The formulated problem is solved using heuristic optimization for large size networks whereas optimal solutions are obtained for small size networks. Planning is performed based on a proactive approach starting with the lowest traffic demand until reaching the highest traffic demand indicating the worst case scenario in the network. The proposed approach is compared to the reactive approach where operators try to adapt their network to traffic changes after network deployment. Performance results are presented for various case studies and evaluated taking into account practical network planning considerations. Results demonstrate considerable energy savings through dynamic adaptation of the number of simultaneously active BSs.