Energy Efficiency Enhancement in 5G Mobile Wireless Networks

In the era of 5G networks, smaller cell infrastructure with denser deployment of various kinds of base stations is leading the trend of the new generation of cellular networks. Benefits, such as higher throughput and lower latency, are driving people to perform further investigation and optimization while the energy efficiency aspect in 5G lacks enough attention. To enhance the energy efficiency of 5G and provide a green future cellular networks, we propose solutions to reduce the impact caused by several foreseen energy problems. We consider three scenarios from connection, communication and power perspectives, trying to minimize the energy consumption by either enforcing idle base stations to sleep or dynamically adjusting the signal range of base stations via software defined networking. Detailed discussion about scenarios and proposed solutions are presented though the simulation and evaluation are still on-going. More results will be presented in the near future.