Power Saving with Capacity Augmentation for Sustained QoS in 5G Cloud RAN

Cellular networks consume significant amount of power. Hence, power saving is key aspect for design of cellular network components. One of the power saving approaches which has been commonly applied is to switch off Base Stations (BSs) which are less loaded. However, with the advent of high bandwidth, ultra reliable and low latency applications in 5G, similar approaches if applied to futuristic networks can lead to overloading of neighbour cells leading to degradation of Quality of Service (QoS) for the User Equipments (UEs). This is because if less loaded cells with UEs having low latency requirements are switched off, those devices may experience degraded QoS when they are moved to their neighbours. This paper proposes a novel power saving idea where the BSs can be switched off without degradation of QoS of the UEs and overloading of neighbour cells, by augmenting the network with additional resources by spawning off new cells, in Cloud based Radio Access Network (CRAN) deployment scenario. Simulation results show substantial power saving can be achieved in the overall RAN. Also, results reveal that power savings can be achieved by switching off even highly loaded cells. Hence, this proposed approach may be applied for power saving in dense 5G networks, where there may be many cells with high load and yet there is a need to save energy.