Sleep to stay healthy: managing the lifetime of energy-efficient cellular networks

We target the problem of managing the Base Stations (BSs) lifetime and their energy efficiency when a sleep mode (SM) is adopted. We first show that the BS lifetime is affected by two opposite effects: the duration of SM, which tends to increase the lifetime, and the SM frequency, which on the contrary decreases the lifetime. After optimally formulating the problem for a cellular network, we propose a new heuristic, called LIFE, to practically solve it. Our solution integrates the BS lifetime when SM decisions are considered. Results, obtained over an UMTS scenario and a LTE one, prove that LIFE outperforms two previous energy-efficient algorithms in terms of lifetime performance, since all the previous solutions tend to drastically reduce the BS lifetime. Moreover, we show that LIFE is able to save up to 40% of power during night in the long-term.