A New Sustainable Mechanism to Wake-up Base Stations in Mobile Networks

International audienceThe Radio Access Network (RAN) represents the large amount of the annual energy consumed in mobile networks. The Base Station (BS) constitutes the main component of a RAN and the its switches ON/OFF is one of the most commonly used technique in literary work to reduce the energy consumption. However, a significant amount of energy is consumed by the BS even with the standby mode. In this paper, we address the problem of energy consumption in mobile networks and propose a new and original wake-up mechanism for base stations based on Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN). Our proposal aims to carry out a complete shutdown of the base stations during low traffic periods in order to reduce the RAN energy consumption. Then, the wake-up process is handled by the Core Network through a LPWAN dedicated for Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as the Long Range (LoRa) system. We first present the architecture of our solution and we explain our wake-up mechanism. Then, we show the performance of our solution through simulation results