Green Cellular Networks through QoS Aware Dynamic Base Station - Mobile Device Reconfiguration

Anytime-anywhere connectivity offered by cellular networks and mobile devices with multimedia capabilities have revolutionized important sectors of the society such as health care, education, finance, e-commerce and entertainment. To cater to the resulting explosive growth in mobile data traffic in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner, it is critical to efficiently manage the spectral and energy/power consumption of cellular networks. In this thesis, we identify the key challenges faced by the cellular networks in efficiently managing energy/power consumption and propose solutions to alleviate the same.;Rapid advances in processing capabilities of mobile devices and relatively slower advances in battery capacity capabilities has created a huge gap between power required for processing advanced multimedia applications and the available battery capacity. Data and compute intensive mobile video is the leading multimedia application and leads to quick drain in the mobile battery level. In the first part of the thesis, we address the above challenge by developing battery aware mobile video download techniques that increase the battery available time while maintaining the required user experience levels. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the feasibility and efficacy of our approach.;Base stations are the dominant contributors to power consumption of cellular networks. To ensure that quality of service requirements is always met, base stations are over provisioned to handle maximum load and are always switched on. This is leads to wasteful expenditure of electricity when load is less than maximum. To address this, we develop techniques that adapt the coverage area of base stations depending on load to reduce base station power consumption. Simulation experiments have demonstrated the significant power savings is possible using the proposed techniques.;Multi-input, multi-output technologies which require multiple Radio Frequency (RF) chains are being adopted to increase the data rates and coverage capabilities of base stations. This implies that the already dominant contribution of RF chains to power consumption of base stations will significantly increase. We conclude the thesis by developing techniques that switch off RF chains depending on load to reduce base station power consumption. Simulation experiments demonstrate the power savings possible using proposed techniques compared to existing techniques.