The impact of sleep modes on the lifetime of cellular networks

Sustainable networking is becoming a paradigm for cellular operators. In this work, we study the interplay between sleep modes and cellular network failure rates. In particular, we have developed a new model to compute the Base Station (BS) lifetime given the hardware (HW) and sleep mode parameters. The BS model is then extended on the entire network to compute the network lifetime. Our findings show that, under certain conditions, sleep modes may increase the cellular network lifetime. These results are confirmed also adopting a realistic scenario and a sleep mode algorithm.