Impact of spatio-temporal power sharing policies on cellular network greening

Greening effect in interference management (IM), which is a technology to enhance spectrum sharing via intelligent BS transmit power control, can be achieved by the fact that even small reduction in BS transmit powers enables considerable saving in overall energy consumption due to their exerting influence on operational powers. In this paper, we study the impact of power sharing policies in IM schemes on cellular network greening, where different spatio-temporal power sharing policies are considered for a fixed system-wide power budget. This study is of great importance in that the pressure on the CO₂ emission limit per nation increases, e.g., by Kyoto protocol, which will ultimately affect the power budget of a wireless service provider. We propose optimization theoretic IM frameworks with greening, from which we first develop four IM schemes with different power sharing policies. Through extensive simulations under various configurations, including a real BS deployment in Manchester city, United Kingdom, we obtain the following interesting observations: (i) tighter greening regulation (i.e., the smaller total power budget) leads to higher spatio-temporal power sharing gain than IM gain, (ii) spatial power sharing significantly excels temporal one, and (iii) more greening gain can be achieved as the cell size becomes smaller.