Reducing Cellular Networks Power Consumption: the Role of Resource Pooling and Cooperation

This paper discusses the role that resource pooling and cooperation may play in reducing the ever-growing power consumption of cellular networks. These two abstractions are often referred to as methods to enhance communication throughput and increase data transmission resilience. The goal of this work is to advocate and highlight that they can also represent effective directions to go through in order to save significant amounts of energy and consequently reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by cellular communications. To demonstrate their potential, this paper presents a network abstraction called Virtual Resource Pooling, that has been designed to enable transparent, network-aware, and massively multipath transmissions through a harmonious integration between the multi-homing capabilities of modern devices and their collaborative potential. In addition to a notional presentation, the paper includes network emulation results that lay out the potential improvements of the proposal to network efficiency. These indicate that the system can scale transmission performance linearly with the number of concurrently forwarding nodes, effectively allowing to harness the unused network resources, and enabling to decouple the network’s energy consumption from the average QoE perceived by users.