Dynamic Traffic Offloading and Transmit Point Muting for Energy and Cost Efficiency in Virtualized Radio Access Networks

A virtualized radio access network (VRAN) is envisaged in next generation wireless networks. Therein, users experience a seamless ubiquitous service without cell-specific signaling through transparent grouping of densely deployed transmit points (TPs) and helping UEs. Aiming at reducing the Carbon footprint as well as the operational expenditure while maintaining users´ QoS, we propose an energy/cost-aware dynamic wideband muting and traffic offloading scheme for the VRAN. The proposed scheme favors muting hypotheses with greater energy/cost savings from TPs with relatively light traffic loads. Such loads are opportunistically offloaded to adjacent TPs to improve their energy efficiency. This is achieved by employing a low-complexity joint wideband muting and multi-point scheduling algorithm optimizing a novel energy-aware utility. The utility accounts for the power consumption models of different TPs, the current cost per unit energy and the TP´s predicted ´Soft Loading Ratio´. Operator controls the energy savings-performance tradeoff in individual network regions regardless of the topology. Simulation results show significant energy efficiency and system capacity gains.