Flexible Base Station Sleeping and Resource Allocation for Green Uplink Fully-Decoupled RAN

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-efficient FD-RAN architecture with adaptive base station sleeping and resource allocation, optimizing power control and user association to enhance green communication in next-generation networks.

Contribution

It introduces a holistic power consumption model and joint optimization framework for FD-RAN, including novel algorithms for BS sleeping and resource allocation.

Findings

Significant energy efficiency improvements demonstrated in simulations.

Effective joint optimization of user association, BS sleeping, and power control.

Proposed algorithms outperform baseline methods in energy savings.

Abstract

The fully-decoupled radio access network (FD-RAN) is an innovative architecture designed for next-generation mobile communication networks, featuring decoupled control and data planes as well as separated uplink and downlink transmissions. To further enhance energy efficiency, this paper explores a green approach to FD-RAN by incorporating adaptive base station (BS) sleeping and resource allocation. First, we introduce a holistic power consumption model and formulate a energy efficiency maximization problem for FD-RAN, involving joint optimization of user equipment (UE) association, BS sleeping, and power control. Subsequently, the optimization problem is decomposed into two subproblems. The first subproblem, involving UE power control, is solved using a successive lower-bound maximization approach based on Dinkelbach's algorithm. The second subproblem, addressing UE association and BS sleeping, is tackled via a modified, low-complexity many-to-many swap matching algorithm. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the superior effectiveness of FD-RAN with our proposed algorithms, revealing the sources of energy efficiency gains.