Realistic Energy Saving Potential of Sleep Mode for Existing and Future Mobile Networks

This paper presents an extensive overview on an energy saving feature referred to as ‘site sleep mode’, designed for existing and future mobile broadband networks. In addition to providing a detailed understanding of the main concept, the paper also provides various studies and results to highlight potential savings, and emphasize some of the expected limitations. Since site measurements show that the energy consumption of base station sites is largely load-independent, this makes such a feature highly effective for reducing the energy consumption of mobile networks during hours of low traffic. After going through a number of different alternatives of the feature, this is applied to different network topologies, macro-only based networks, and a set of heterogeneous networks that employ the use of small cells in traffic hotspots. Results obtained through detailed case studies show that sleep mode can reduce the average daily energy consumption of a network by around 30%. This can be achieved while maintaining a predefined level of performance, used as a measure of comparing different scenarios.