Separation of Control and Data Transmissions in 5G Networks may not be Beneficial
Zainab R. Zaidi, Hazer Inaltekin, Jamie Evans

TL;DR
This study challenges the assumed energy efficiency benefits of separating control and data transmissions in 5G networks, showing limited savings and highlighting the advantages of on-demand small cell deployment.
Contribution
It provides a detailed analysis demonstrating that separation architectures offer minimal energy savings compared to traditional systems, especially in CloudRAN settings, and advocates for on-demand small cell usage.
Findings
Energy savings of separation are under 17% compared to legacy systems.
In CloudRAN, separation reduces energy consumption by only about 7%.
Most small cells remain active during nights to handle data loads.
Abstract
The logical separation of control signaling from data transmission in a mobile cellular network has been shown to have significant energy saving potential compared with the legacy systems. As a result, there has been a lot of focus in recent years on development and realization of separation architectures. Our study, however, shows that the energy savings of separation architecture remain under 16-17% when compared with legacy systems and this gain falls to a mere 7% when both architectures are realized under a CloudRAN (CRAN) setting. Moreover, when we strategically place some small base-stations (SBSs) to cover the area in a densely deployed scenario and allow all other base-stations (BSs) to be used only on-demand, the system consumes much less energy than the separation architecture. While we expected that most equipment would be shut down during nights, our study shows that around…
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