Coping with power outages in mobile networks

In a foreseen "post-peak" era, when oil production declines making energy price increase and leading to important economical implications descending from oil being the foundation of our industrial system, the development and maintenance of large infrastructures will become the more and more difficult due to possible power distribution outages and instabilities. The situation for communication infrastructures will probably be particularly critical due to the expected growth of service demand which will require the expansion of the networks and, corresponding, a growth of the power needs that could become difficult to continuously guarantee. Hence, critical infrastructures like communication networks will have to be equipped with power backup systems. In this paper, we focus on the effect of possible power outages on heterogeneous mobile networks. Starting from the characterisation of today outages, we assess the impact of outages on Quality of Service (QoS) of Radio Access Networks (RANs) and we discuss power backup system sizing.