Dynamic resource provisioning for energy efficiency in wireless access networks: A survey and an outlook

Abstract—Traditionally, energy efficiency aspects have been included in the wireless access network design space only in the context of power control aimed at interference mitigation, and for the increase of the terminal battery lifetime. Energy consumption of network components has also, for a long time, not been considered an issue, neither in equipment design, nor in network planning and management. However, in recent years, with the user demand increasing at nearly exponential pace, and margins rapidly shrinking, concerns about energy efficiency have been raised, with the objective to reduce network operational costs (not to mention the environmental issues). Installing more energy-efficient hardware does not seem to fully solve the problem, since wireless access networks are almost invariably (over)provisioned with respect to the peak user demand. This means that efficient resource management schemes, capable of controlling how muc