# Energy-Sustainable Traffic Steering for 5G Mobile Networks

## TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-sustainable traffic steering framework for 5G networks that dynamically adjusts traffic loads to match renewable energy availability, reducing grid energy use while maintaining QoS.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel framework that integrates inter- and intra-tier steering, caching, and pushing to enhance renewable energy utilization in 5G networks.

## Key findings

- Reduces on-grid energy consumption
- Maintains quality of service (QoS)
- Demonstrates effectiveness through case studies

## Abstract

Renewable energy harvesting (EH) technology is expected to be pervasively utilized in the next generation (5G) mobile networks to support sustainable network developments and operations. However, the renewable energy supply is inherently random and intermittent, which could lead to energy outage, energy overflow, quality of service (QoS) degradation, etc. Accordingly, how to enhance renewable energy sustainability is a critical issue for green networking. To this end, an energy-sustainable traffic steering framework is proposed in this article, where the traffic load is dynamically adjusted to match with energy distributions in both spatial and temporal domains by means of inter- and intra-tier steering, caching and pushing. Case studies are carried out, which demonstrate the proposed framework can reduce on-grid energy demand while satisfying QoS requirements. Research topics and challenges of energy-sustainable traffic steering are also discussed.