Tradeoffs in green cellular networks
Abstract
The growing awareness to negative impact of wireless technology on our environment has lead to designing green networks in which energy saving plays an important role. We consider energy saving by switching off a fraction of the base stations. This saving comes at some cost: the coverage is reduced , and moreover, the uplink transmission power of mobiles may increase. This may imply exposure of the human body to stronger electromagnetic fields. We quantify this through the deactivation of base stations under the assumptions that the random location of base stations and mobiles form Poisson processes. Our model yields explicit expressions for both the uplink power and the coverage probability. For the case with non negligible interference, the uplink power is obtained by using stochastic differential equations assuming exponential attenuation model. We observe that when the mobiles have no power constraints, unlike in the case of negligible interference, switching off base stations reduces the uplink power.