Balancing infrastructure fatigue, energy consumption and user profits in cellular networks

We target a heterogeneous LTE cellular network comprising macro eNBs and hot spot micro eNBs and define a comprehensive measure of profitability referred to as sustainability. This metric combines all relevant factors for the economic balance of the cellular access, namely: i) the user profits, which depend on the offered level of Quality of Service; ii) the energy costs of the cellular network; and iii) the fatigue infrastructure costs, which are influenced by the power state changes of cellular equipment over time. We define a threshold based adaptive policy to maximize the total sustainability by varying the power states of micro eNBs over time. Performance results point out that an adaptive policy can outperform static ones.