In order to quantify the energy efficiency of a wireless network, the power consumption of the entire system needs to be captured. In this article, the necessary extensions with respect to existing performance evaluation frameworks are discussed. The most important addenda of the proposed energy efficiency evaluation framework (E3F) are a sophisticated power model for various base station types, as well as large-scale long-term traffic models. The BS power model maps the RF output power radiated at the antenna elements to the total supply power of a BS site. The proposed traffic model emulates the spatial distribution of the traffic demands over large geographical regions, including urban and rural areas, as well as temporal variations between peak and off-peak hours. Finally, the E3F is applied to quantify the energy efficiency of the downlink of a 3GPP LTE radio access network.

How much energy is needed to run a wireless network

Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks, explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogenous network deployment based on micro, pico and femtocells can be used to achieve this goal. Since cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a "green" cellular network technology.

Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

The cloud is migrating to the edge of the network, where routers themselves may become the virtualisation infrastructure, in an evolution labelled as "the fog". However, many other complementary technologies are reaching a high level of maturity. Their interplay may dramatically shift the information and communication technology landscape in the following years, bringing separate technologies into a common ground. This paper offers a comprehensive definition of the fog, comprehending technologies as diverse as cloud, sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks, network virtualisation functions or configuration management techniques. We highlight the main challenges faced by this potentially breakthrough technology amalgamation.

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Finding your Way in the Fog: Towards a Comprehensive Definition of Fog Computing

Due to the broadcast nature of radio propagation, the wireless air interface is open and accessible to both authorized and illegitimate users. This completely differs from a wired network, where communicating devices are physically connected through cables and a node without direct association is unable to access the network for illicit activities. The open communications environment makes wireless transmissions more vulnerable than wired communications to malicious attacks, including both the passive eavesdropping for data interception and the active jamming for disrupting legitimate transmissions. Therefore, this paper is motivated to examine the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state of the art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. Several physical-layer security techniques are reviewed and compared, including information-theoretic security, artificial-noise-aided security, security-oriented beamforming, diversity-assisted security, and physical-layer key generation approaches. Since a jammer emitting radio signals can readily interfere with the legitimate wireless users, we also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their countermeasures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer, and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.

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A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances, and Future Trends

Future generation cellular networks are expected to provide ubiquitous broadband access to a continuously growing number of mobile users. In this context, LTE systems represent an important milestone towards the so called 4G cellular networks. A key feature of LTE is the adoption of advanced Radio Resource Management procedures in order to increase the system performance up to the Shannon limit. Packet scheduling mechanisms, in particular, play a fundamental role, because they are responsible for choosing, with fine time and frequency resolutions, how to distribute radio resources among different stations, taking into account channel condition and QoS requirements. This goal should be accomplished by providing, at the same time, an optimal trade-off between spectral efficiency and fairness. In this context, this paper provides an overview on the key issues that arise in the design of a resource allocation algorithm for LTE networks. It is intended for a wide range of readers as it covers the topic from basics to advanced aspects. The downlink channel under frequency division duplex configuration is considered as object of our study, but most of the considerations are valid for other configurations as well. Moreover, a survey on the most recent techniques is reported, including a classification of the different approaches presented in literature. Performance comparisons of the most well-known schemes, with particular focus on QoS provisioning capabilities, are also provided for complementing the described concepts. Thus, this survey would be useful for readers interested in learning the basic concepts before going into the details of a particular scheduling strategy, as well as for researchers aiming at deepening more specific aspects.

/pdf/downlink-packet-scheduling-in-lte-cellular-networks-key-1z27kezket.pdf

Downlink Packet Scheduling in LTE Cellular Networks: Key Design Issues and a Survey

This article provides an overview of the LTE radio interface, recently approved by the 3GPP, together with a more in-depth description of its features such as spectrum flexibility, multi-antenna transmission, and inter-cell interference control. The performance of LTE and some of its key features is illustrated with simulation results. The article is concluded with an outlook into the future evolution of LTE.

LTE: the evolution of mobile broadband

Mobile communications are increasingly contributing to global energy consumption. In this article, a holistic approach for energy efficient mobile radio networks is presented. The matter of having appropriate metrics and evaluation methods that allow assessing the energy efficiency of the entire system is discussed. The mutual supplementary saving concepts comprise component, link and network levels. At the component level the power amplifier complemented by a transceiver and a digital platform supporting advanced power management are key to efficient radio implementations. Discontinuous transmission by base stations, where hardware components are switched off, facilitate energy efficient operation at the link level. At the network level, the potential for reducing energy consumption is in the layout of networks and their management, that take into account slowly changing daily load patterns, as well as highly dynamic traffic fluctuations. Moreover, research has to analyze new disruptive architectural approaches, including multi-hop transmission, ad-hoc meshed networks, terminal-to-terminal communications, and cooperative multipoint architectures.

Challenges and enabling technologies for energy aware mobile radio networks

This paper provides a high-level overview of some technology components currently considered for the evolution of LTE including complete fulfillment of the IMT-advanced requirements. These technology components include extended spectrum flexibility, multi-antenna solutions, coordinated multipoint transmission/reception, and the use of advanced repeaters/relaying. A simple performance assessment is also included, indicating potential for significantly increased performance.

LTE-Advanced - Evolving LTE towards IMT-Advanced

This paper discusses how energy consumption can be significantly reduced in mobile networks by introducing discontinuous transmission (DTX) on the base station side. By introducing DTX on the downlink, or cell DTX, we show that it is possible to achieve significant energy reductions in an LTE network. Cell DTX is most efficient when the traffic load is low in a cell but even when realistic traffic statistics are considered the gains are impressive. The technology potential for a metropolitan area is shown to be 90% reduced energy consumption compared to no use of cell DTX. The paper also discusses different drives for the increased focus on energy efficient network operation and also provides insights on the impact of cell DTX from a life cycle assessment perspective.

Reducing Energy Consumption in LTE with Cell DTX

3GPP is in the process of defining the long-term evolution (LTE) for 3G radio access, sometimes referred to as Super-3G, in order to maintain the future competitiveness of 3G technology. The main targets for this evolution concern increased data rates, improved spectrum efficiency, improved coverage, and reduced latency. Taken together these result in significantly improved service provisioning and reduced operator costs in a variety of traffic scenarios. This paper gives an overview of the basic radio interface principles for the 3G long-term evolution concept, including OFDM and advanced antenna solution, and presents performance results indicating to what extent the requirements/targets can be met. It is seen that the targets on three-fold user throughput and spectrum efficiency compared to basic WCDMA can be fulfilled with the current working assumptions. More advanced WCDMA systems, employing e.g. advanced antenna solutions may however achieve similar performance gains. Enhancements for reduced latency and IP optimized architectures and protocols are further applicable to both LTE and WCDMA.

https://www.3g4g.co.uk/Lte/LTE_WP_0602_Ericsson.pdf

Ylva Jading

Papers

LTE: the evolution of mobile broadband

Challenges and enabling technologies for energy aware mobile radio networks

LTE-Advanced - Evolving LTE towards IMT-Advanced

Reducing Energy Consumption in LTE with Cell DTX

The 3G Long-Term Evolution - Radio Interface Concepts and Performance Evaluation