Dynamic Traffic Offloading and Transmit Point Muting for Energy and Cost Efficiency in Virtualized Radio Access Networks

A virtualized radio access network (VRAN) is envisaged in next generation wireless networks. Therein, users experience a seamless ubiquitous service without cell-specific signaling through transparent grouping of densely deployed transmit points (TPs) and helping UEs. Aiming at reducing the Carbon footprint as well as the operational expenditure while maintaining users' QoS, we propose an energy/cost-aware dynamic wideband muting and traffic offloading scheme for the VRAN. The proposed scheme favors muting hypotheses with greater energy/cost savings from TPs with relatively light traffic loads. Such loads are opportunistically offloaded to adjacent TPs to improve their energy efficiency. This is achieved by employing a low-complexity joint wideband muting and multi-point scheduling algorithm optimizing a novel energy-aware utility. The utility accounts for the power consumption models of different TPs, the current cost per unit energy and the TP's predicted 'Soft Loading Ratio'. Operator controls the energy savings-performance tradeoff in individual network regions regardless of the topology. Simulation results show significant energy efficiency and system capacity gains.