MORFEO: Saving energy in wireless access infrastructures

Energy efficiency is acknowledged as a pivotal issue for a sustainable development of wireless networking technologies. Traditionally, most works in the area focused on the user equipment, where battery duration represents a key asset. However, as the smartphone and tablet revolution fuels a massive deployment of wireless networks, often in the form of WiFi hotspots, more and more attention is expected to be devoted to the energy-efficient management of wireless access infrastructure. These networks tend to be dense and over-provisioned, which in time leads to significant energy wastage in off-peak conditions. In this paper, we present MORFEO a flexible energy-saving decision algorithm to tune the energy consumption of a wireless infrastructure to the actual network conditions in terms of both user density and traffic patterns. Experimental results from a real-life deployment shows that our solution can deliver significant energy savings with minimal degradation in terms of the quality of service provided.