Heuristic Algorithms for Optimization of Energy Consumption in Wireless Access Networks

Energy consumption of wireless access networks is in permanent increase, which necessitates development of more energy-efficient network management approaches. Such management schemes must result with adaptation of network energy consumption in accordance with daily variations in user activity. In this paper, we consider possible energy savings of wireless local area networks (WLANs) through development of a few integer linear programming (ILP) models. Effectiveness of ILP models providing energy-efficient management of network resources have been tested on several WLAN instances of different sizes. To cope with the problem of high computational time characteristic for some ILP models, we further develop several heuristic algorithms that are based on greedy methods and local search. Although heuristics obtains somewhat higher results of energy consumption in comparison with the ones of corresponding ILP models, heuristic algorithms ensures minimization of network energy consumption in an amount of time that is acceptable for practical implementations. This confirms that network management algorithms will play a significant role in practical realization of future energy-efficient network management systems.