Traffic-driven power saving in operational 3G cellular networks

Base stations (BSes) in the 3G cellular network are not energy proportional with respect to their carried traffic load. Our mea- surements show that 3G traffic exhibits high fluctuations both in time and over space, thus incurring energy waste. In this paper, we propose a profile-based approach to green cellular infrastruc- ture. We profile BS traffic and approximate network-wide energy proportionality using non-load-adaptive BSes. The instrument is to leverage temporal-spatial traffic diversity and node deployment heterogeneity, and power off under-utilized BSes under light traf- fic. Our evaluation on four regional 3G networks shows that this simple scheme yields up to 53% energy savings in a dense large city and 23% in a sparse, mid-sized city.