Towards energy-aware 5G heterogeneous networks

Over the past decade, the telecommunication industry has witnessed excessive growth in the number of mobile users. Market forecasts envision that there will be nearly 8.6 billion mobile devices worldwide by 2017. This tremendous increase in the number of cellular users demands an expansion in the wireless Base Stations (BSs) for improved coverage and capacity. However, this hike in the deployment of base stations will lead to immense energy consumption, because in mobile networks 70-80% of the power is consumed by BSs. This upsurge in the energy consumption of telecommunication networks implies an increase in CO2 emissions in the environment. In addition, energy bills also represent a major chunk of wireless network operators' expenditures. These ecological and economical challenges have provoked the curiosity of telecommunication standardization bodies and researchers in an emerging research area termed 'energy-aware Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets)'. HetNets are a mix of various cell shapes and sizes, including high power macro cells and low power nodes such as micro cells, pico cells and relays. The large macro cells are responsible for the basic coverage of the cell users, and the small cells are effective in providing higher data rates to their nearby users in dense areas with reduced power consumption. The combination of various BSswith different cell sizes and a wide range of power levels can lead to substantial gains in network energy consumption by creating hotspots and enabling dense spatial reuse. It is envisioned that a dense deployment of low power BSs will take place in the near future. HetNets in particular are considered as a promising solution for Fifth Generation (5G) in order to meet the exponentially growing demand for multimedia traffic. The main focus of this chapter is to investigate optimal energy efficient deployment strategies for low power nodes such as relays and small cells in 5G HetNets. In this chapter, a comprehensive overview of remarkable small cell deployment schemes is presented in order to facilitate the debate on technical challenges in deploying HetNets. It goes on to discuss some useful techniques to mitigate the severe interference in 5G dense HetNets. Finally, a novel Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced relay deployment scheme is introduced using graph theory, not only to address some of the identified deficiencies of existing solutions, but also to optimize the energy efficiency of 5G cellular networks.