Advanced Sleep Modes and their impact on flow-level performance of 5G networks

The concept of Advanced Sleep Modes (ASMs) corresponds to a gradual deactivation of the Base Station (BS)'s components in order to decrease the Energy Consumption (EC). We propose in this paper a strategy to implement the ASMs and to manage users whose service requests occur whilst the BS is sleeping. As the BS has to wake up periodically to send signaling bursts, we increase this periodicity in order to extend the sleep durations and hence maximize the energy gains. We study several scenarios with various traffic profiles and different periodicities of signaling bursts and quantify the outcomes of this solution, both in terms of EC reduction and quality perceived by the users (mainly throughput and latency). Our results show that high energy gains (up to 90%) can be obtained using ASMs, albeit some degradation in throughput (ranging from 3% to 19% in low loads depending on the signaling periodicity) and latency (less than 1ms for low periodicities and around 5ms for larger ones).