Optimal resource management in mobile communication networks for energy efficiency

由于能源成本的上升和温室气体排放对环境的严重影响，能源效率在过去几年已经成为一个关键问题。据透露，仅移动通信网络每年就消耗约600亿千瓦时。能源消耗将直接转化为二氧化碳排放、全球变暖、温室气体排放、干扰污染等，对环境产生巨大影响。此外，从经济角度来看，能源消耗也是一个令人担忧的问题，因为电力费用往往会增加。能源成本占移动运营商运营费用的一半之多。环境保护的责任和降低运营费用的动机都促使网络运营商寻找降低网络能耗的解决方案，这一目标刺激了创新研究。 然而，解决节能问题的大部分研究工作都是从单个设备或最终用户的角度进行的，而涉及整个网络的工作在某种程度上是以简单的流量/网络模型为基础的，并没有严格分析干预对服务质量(Qos)的影响。当前网络的设计和部署通常是为了适应高峰流量负载，而在低流量负载下，其元件上的功耗会高得不必要。从网络的角度来看，这显示出提高能效的巨大潜力。本研究将从网络的角度来解决移动通信网络的能效问题。其目标是开发新的网络管理技术来动态调整网络设备的功耗，适应业务负载随时间的变化，并提出新的网络规划和部署策略，不仅考虑频谱效率和覆盖，还考虑能量效率。我们还将调查所提出的能效机制对用户感知的服务质量的影响，并研究能效与服务质量之间的权衡。 通过这项研究开发的技术将使移动通信网络具有前所未有的能源效率，并显著减少环境污染，从而为建设“绿色”加拿大作出重大贡献。网络能耗的大幅降低也将为移动网络运营商节省大量成本。尖端研究将产生新的想法和技术，预计将为加拿大电信业带来新的收入来源，并带来巨大的社会回报。该研究计划将为研究生和本科生提供HQP培训，这些学生将成为与信息和通信技术相关的加拿大关键工业部门的科学家/工程师，并为学术界贡献人才。

Energy efficiency has become a key issue in the last few years due to the rising energy costs and serious environmental impacts of greenhouse gas emissions. It has been revealed that the mobile communication networks alone consume approximately 60 billion kWh per year. The energy consumption will directly translate into CO2 emission, global warming, greenhouse gas emission, and interference pollution all with a huge impact on the environment. Furthermore, the energy consumption is also a concern from an economic perspective as expenses for electricity tend to increase. Energy costs account for as much as half of a mobile operator's operational expenses. Both the responsibility of environmental protection and the incentive to lower the operational expenses have motivated network operators to find solutions to reduce energy consumption of their networks, and that objective stimulates innovative research. However, most of the research efforts in addressing the energy saving issue are from the individual device or end user's perspective, and the works that deal with the entire network are somewhat preliminary with simple traffic/network models and do not rigorously analyze the effect of interventions on quality-of-service (QoS). The current networks are typically designed and deployed to accommodate peak traffic load, and the power consumption on their elements is unnecessarily high under low traffic load. This shows great potential for improvement of energy efficiency from network perspective. This research will tackle the energy efficiency issue of mobile communication networks from network perspective. The objectives are to develop novel network management technologies to dynamically adjust the power consumption of network facilitates, adaptive to traffic load variations over time, and propose new network planning and deployment strategies, taking not only spectral efficiency and coverage, but also energy efficiency into account. We will also investigate the impact of the proposed energy efficiency mechanisms on QoS perceived by users, and study the tradeoff between the energy efficiency and QoS. The technologies developed from this research will enable mobile communication networks with unprecedented energy efficiency and significant reduction in environment pollution, therefore making considerable contribution to developing a “green” Canada. The substantial reduction of network energy consumption will also yield large cost savings for mobile network operators. The cutting-edge research will generate new ideas and techniques, which are expected to spawn new revenue sources for the Canada telecommunication industry and also great social payback. This research program will produce HQP training for graduate and undergraduate students who will become scientists/engineers for critical Canadian industrial sectors related to information and communications technologies as well as contribute talent to academia.