SdBaSE: Software-defined Base Station for Energy-efficient Federated Cellular Networks

By offering various advantages, including faster data transmission speed, greater capacity, lower latency, and reliability, 5G becomes an enabling technology for future mobile applications such as smart cities, intelligent transportation, education, entertainment, smart homes, and healthcare. However, co-existing with 4G LTE networks over the next decade, a 5G base station adds three times additional power consumption over a 4G base station, and more 5G base stations are required to cover the same area. Hence, it is essential to devise schemes to improve energy efficiency in cellular networks (both 4G LTE and 5G) to tackle mounting deployments and large energy consumption of base stations. In this paper, we propose a Software-defined Base Station for Energy-efficient Federated Cellular Networks (SdBaSE). SdBaSE is designed as a network function virtualization (NFV) of the service-based architecture (SBA) in 5G NR and an eNodeB power control NFV in 4G LTE. It provides significant benefits over current cellular networks that suffer from inflexible cell power management and complex control. We develop a cell management algorithm on the architecture that can effectively control base station sleep and awake modes and perform handover operations in a cellular network. Our trace-driven evaluation results show that the proposed control architecture and the cell management algorithm incur more cells in a sleep mode for longer durations. Besides, it causes lower cell status changes than existing cell-zooming approaches, achieving significant energy savings.