Reduction of Power Consumption in Cellular Radio Access Network

Abstract

All over the world, the desire to communicate is known to be peak between 5pm and 9pm which is usually associated with high demand for social calls that account for 16.6% of time in a day. It is within this period that network utilization is at the peak. Network planners dimension their networks by using the peak period normally referred to as the busy hour. The planning which considers only the busy hour of the busy day of the month creates excess capacity in the network. The excess capacity, even when idle, continues to use resources like power and air conditioning. Moreover, emerging trends in cellular communication are shifting from the manual operation and maintenance to more automated ones in the self-organizing networks defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) release 8.This paper is aims at reviewing the methods that have been used to reduce power consumption in the radio network and propose new methods that employ the use of selforganizing networks.