Energy-Efficient Sleep Mode Schemes for Cell-Less RAN in 5G and Beyond 5G Networks

Abstract

In 5G and beyond 5G networks, the new cell-less radio access network architecture is adopted to overcome the extreme network capacity challenges generated by massive wireless devices used for diverse scenarios and various applications. At the same time, the evolution of mobile communications faces the important challenge of increased network power consumption. To fulfill user demands for various user densities and meanwhile reduce the power consumption, we present a novel energy-efficiency enhancement scheme, i.e., (3 × E) to increase the transmission rate per energy unit, with stable performance within the cell-less radio access network (RAN) architecture. Our proposed (3 × E) scheme activates two-step sleep modes (i.e., certain phase and conditional phase) through the intelligent interference management for temporarily switching access points (APs) to sleep, optimizing the network energy efficiency (EE) in highly loaded scenarios, as well as in scenarios with lower load. An intelligent control over underutilized/unused APs is considered, taking their interference contribution into account as the primary main criteria in addition to load-based conditional criteria. Therefore, our proposed scheme assures a stable performance enhancement and maintains an efficient power saving when the number of UEs increases, improving existing works not addressing this performance stability in peak-traffic hours. Simulation results show that the network EE is improved up to 30% compared to the reference algorithm and up to 60% with respect to the baseline algorithm in which all APs are active all the time.INDEX TERMS Cell-less, radio access network, sleep mode approach, energy-efficient, 5G and beyond.

Radio Resource Management Scheme for URLLC and eMBB Coexistence in a Cell-Less Radio Access Network

“…It is obvious from the above literature that existing techniques and approaches of the radio resource allocation and management of the 5G systems will not be sufficient to satisfy these emerging and envisaged use cases in the cell-less paradigm, rather it would require to introduce new schemes of radio resource management. In [33], we proposed a sleep mode scheme within a cell-less architecture using cooperative interference management. The proposed interference management technique helps to achieve a stable performance within a cell-less architecture with a large number of users.…”

Artificial Intelligence and Energy Efficiency of 5G Radio Access Network

“…The viability of the solution (AI-directed sleep modes) has been tested in several recent studies through simulations. Kooshki et al (2022), for instance, ran sleep-mode simulations to learn how viable the solution was. The concept of AI-based energy efficiency models has three (3) prime emphases; 1) increased transmission rate per energy unit, 2) consistent performance during the switching in and out of the sleep modes, and 3) cell-less RAN architecture.…”