Performance Modeling and Energy Conservation in Mobile Networks

Abstract

During the last decade, the mobile network market has expanded tremendously, with sharply increased number of mobile users and demand for mobile network traffic. Mobile operators have to find a way to meet these new demands and keeping their costs minimum. Therefore, such incredible increased demands and the needs of high quality of services (QoS) from users limit the energy consumption in mobile network. This project aims to find out practical solutions to reduce the power consumption of a mobile network and save the cost for mobile operators. Based on the background study on network architecture and simulation methodology, Markov Chain Simulation has been employed to model a 49-cell mobile network. Blocking probability is used to measure the QoS. Then, this project focuses on the possible solutions to reduce the energy consumption of the mobile network. The main idea is to selectively switch off base stations when their traffic is low. In this project, two methods are applied in the 49-cell mobile network, which are fixed switch-off schemes and traffic dependent energy consumption model. Simulation results, measured by percentage of energy saved, have been compared. Moreover, the differences between the simulated and real mobile networks also have been discussed.