5G Green Communications: C-RAN Provisioning of CoMP and Femtocells for Power Management

The fifth generation (5G) wireless network is ex- pected to have dense deployments of cells in order to provide efficient Internet and cellular connections. The cloud radio access network (C- RAN) emerges as one of the 5G solutions to steer the network architecture and control resources beyond the legacy radio access technologies. The C-RAN decouples the traffic management operations from the radio access technologies leading to a new combination of virtualized network core and fronthaul architecture. In this paper, we first investigate the power consumption impact due to the aggressive deployments of low-power neighborhood femtocell networks (NFNs) under the umbrella of a coordinated multipoint (CoMP) macrocell. We show that power savings obtained from employing low power NFN start to decline as the density of deployed femtocells exceed certain threshold. The analysis considers two CoMP sites at the cell-edge and intra-cell areas. Second, to restore the power efficiency and network stabilization, a C-RAN model is proposed to restructure the NFN into clusters to ease the energy burden in the evolving 5G systems. Tailoring this to traffic load, selected clusters will be switched off to save power when they operate with low traffic loads.