Energy-Efficient Management
of UMTS Access Networks
Luca Chiaraviglio, Delia Ciullo, Michela Meo, Marco Ajmone Marsan
Electronics Department, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy
Abstract—The increasing concern about the energy consump-
tion of telecommunication networks is driving operators to
manage their equipments so as to optimize energy utilization
without sacrificing the user experience. In this paper, we focus on
UMTS access networks, since access devices are the main energy
consumers in UMTS networks. We propose a novel approach
for the energy-aware management of UMTS access networks,
consisting in a dynamic network planning, that, based on the
instantaneous traffic intensity, reduces the number of active
access devices when they are underutilized (typically at night).
When some access devices are switched off, radio coverage and
service provisioning are taken care of by the devices that remain
active, possibly with some small increase in the emitted power,
so as to guarantee that service is available over the whole area,
with the desired quality.
I. INTRODUCTION
ICT is becoming a major component of the energy con-
sumption budget. Current estimates indicate that ICT is re-
sponsible for a significant fraction of the world electricity con-
sumption, ranging between 2% and 10% [1]. The main energy
consumers in the ICT field are large data centers and server
farms, and telecommunication networks, including wired and
wireless telephony networks as well as the Internet. Both the
networking equipment themselves, and the associated cooling
systems are greedy energy consumers. In Italy, Telecom Italia,
the main TELCO in the Country, consumes more than 2 TWh
a year, representing about 1% of the total national electricity
demand, second only to the national railway system [2]. The
energy consumption of ICT is expected to grow even further
in the future. Estimates forecast a ten-fold increase of the
energy consumed by the telecommunication sector in Italy in
the next ten years, the main culprit being customer prem