Dynamic capacity sharing based energy saving market for MNOs

Abstract

As the larger share of total energy consumed by mobile network operators (MNOs) is wasted in order to ensure coverage, three to five MNOs covering the same geographical area results in enormous energy waste. In order to cater for the data tsunami with almost zero marginal revenue, required densification of cells are not sustainable from both Capex and Opex perspective. Even with densification of networks, it is hard to satisfy the performance requirement of the cell edge users due to interference. However, the performance can be upgraded as well as energy can be saved by the offloading of the cell edge users to other MNOs if regulator and MNOs resort to appropriate mechanism. In our previous work, we proposed a double auction based energy saving market mechanism where MNOs participate in bidding to share coverage and capacity in order to save energy, especially during low to medium load. Unlike previous work, in this paper we use this mechanism that involve cell level bidding, i.e., cells bid for each user which not only allows total offloading of the cells at the low load but also offloading of cell edge users among the MNOs during high load. As a result, the energy saving potential becomes very high also at high load conditions along with improvement in performance of cell edge users.