Energy-Efficient Baseband Unit Placement in a Fixed/Mobile Converged WDM Aggregation Network

Energy efficiency is expected to be a key design parameter for next-generation access/aggregation networks. Using a single network infrastructure to aggregate/backhaul both mobile and fixed network traffic, typically referred to as fixed/mobile convergence (FMC), seems a promising strategy to pursue energy efficiency. WDM networks are a prominent candidate to support next-generation FMC network architectures, as they provide huge capacity at relatively low costs and energy consumption. We consider a FMC WDM aggregation network in which the novel concept of “hotelling” of mobile baseband units (BBUs) is employed. The so-called BBU hotelling consists in separating BBUs from their cell sites and consolidating them in single locations, called hotels. As a result, the aggregation network will transport both IP (fixed and mobile) traffic and CPRI (fronthaul) traffic, the latter exchanged between each BBU and its cell site. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient WDM aggregation network, and we formally define the BBU placement optimization problem, whose objective is to minimize the defined aggregation infrastructure power (AIP). We consider three different network architectures: Bypass, Opaque, and No-Hotel, which feature different placement of BBUs and routing of traffic. By modeling the power contributions of each active device, we study how and how much BBU consolidation, optical bypass, and active traffic aggregation influence the AIP, for all the three architectures. Our results show that, in our case study, the proposed architectures enable savings up to about 60%-65% in dense-urban/urban and about 40% in rural scenarios.