Energy efficiency is one of the great technological challenges of our times. Recently, the concerns for the environmental consequences of the huge rate with which energy is consumed is leading to the awareness that electricity consumption and waste should be reduced in all sectors. The ICT (Information and Communication Technology) sector makes no exception, since it is becoming a major component of the worldwide energy consumption budget. Among the main consumers in the ICT sector, telecommunication networks have a significant role. In light of this fact, the design of solutions to reduce the energy consumption is a timely and crucial objective of current scientific research. In this presentation we focus on UMTS access networks, since access devices are the main energy consumers in cellular 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, namely the Base Stations (BSs), when they are underutilized. When some BSs are switched off, radio coverage and service provisioning are taken care of by the BSs 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. Moreover, we analyze the switch-off/on transients for one cell, investigating the amount of time necessary to implement the switch-off, while allowing terminals to handover to a new BS without overloading the signaling channels, and we show that the switch-off/on durations have a marginal impact on the energy savings achievable with the sleep mode scheme.

Short Bio:

Delia Ciullo received the Master degree in Telecommunication Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering, both from Politecnico di Torino in 2007 and 2011, respectively. In 2009, she has been a visiting student at the CNRG group of MIT, under the supervision of Prof. Eytan Modiano. She is currently a post-doc at Politecnico di Torino. Her research interests are in the fields of energy-aware networks, scaling properties in wireless networks, and P2P systems.

The conference will be conducted in English