Sharing RANs for energy efficiency

The transition towards 5G scenarios is coping with increasingly demanding communication services featuring strict Quality of Service constraints, hence leading to extreme densi- fication of Radio Access Networks (RANs), especially in urban environment. This process, in turn, raises relevant sustainability concerns, due to the growing energy demand of network infras- tructures that typically result overprovisioned and underutilized. In this context, this paper aims at exploring the potential benefits derived from sharing network resources among Mobile Operators (MOs) to make the RAN operation more sustainable and resilient. Considering real mobile traffic profiles, various types of traffic areas, and different MOs, we implement Network Sharing (NS) strategies aiming at sharing the bandwidth capacity among BSs owned by different MOs. These strategies are proved effective to deactivate unneeded network resources for long periods of time under proper configuration settings, hence saving energy and reducing operational cost for MOs. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of traffic features and location dependent network characteristics on the NS performance. Finally, we show that a proper tuning of the NS parameters based on traffic demand characterization is crucial to effectively trade off sustainability goals and the need to preserve network nodes from fast degradation.