1 Feasibility of Green Network Deployment for LTE Network Using Genetic Algorithm Technique Aida Al-Samawi, Aduwati Sali, Nor Kamariah Noordin, Mohamed Othman*, and Fazirulhisyam Hashim Dept. of Computer and Communication Systems Engineering Faculty of Engineering, UPM, 43400, Selangor, Malaysia Department of Communication Technology and Network, FSKTM,UPM,43400,Selangor, Malaysia* Email: aalsamawi@gmail.com Abstract—Green technology is a new term which is used to describe the energy efficient technologies. The main aim of the en- ergy efficient technology is to reduce the total energy consumption while maintaining the functionality and quality of the respective technology. In the context of mobile communications technology, complying with the green technology strategy is a challenge. This is because of the tradeoff between the Quality of Service (QoS) provided and the total energy used in the transmission. Reducing the transmission energy may cause degradation in the QoS, more distinctively, in dense areas. This paper explores the possibility of achieving the green technology goal in planning and deployment of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile network. A real scenario from operators in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is used for the purpose of the investigation. Pathloss estimation is based on ERICSSON 999 method and the region of interest is represented as Digital Terrain Map (DTM). The planned base station locations, transmission power and heights are provided by the operator. Genetic Algorithm is developed to estimate the base station parameters for more energy efficient LTE network deployment. Results show that a remarkable energy saving of about 26% of the operator transmission power could be achieved by selecting the appropriate base station parameters in planning stage while maintaining the QoS of the network. Index Terms—Green Network, Genetic Algorithm, LTE, Radio Network Planning. I. I NTRODUCTION S INCE the industrial revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the demand of energy resources has been growing up relentlessly. This sudden and huge demand has had its impact on the environment leading to emerging issues of imbalance, and threatening our existence on earth due to global warming. As a result, the need of continuing the current life style has to consider sustainability, which could only be achieved if the environment is considered in the equation. The term green technology refers to all the measures and actions that are conducted in order to efficiently utilize the energy resources, nevertheless, producing the same desired product quality. Mobile communication networks shares a significant part of the global energy consumption. Nowadays, the booming reliance on mobile services caused the requirements of mobile communication services to grow very rapidly. This increase adds tension on the power resources since it needs wider bandwidth and higher data rates to accommodate the market demands and the expanding number of users and services. Annually, it is estimated that 58 MW is the total power consumption of a network consisting of 20,000 3G base stations [1]. Base stations transmission power accounts for 60-80% of the total power consumed in the network [2]. These power consumption figures motivates the consideration of the green network planning as an essential step to reduce the impact of wireless technology on the environment, especially that there is a collective aim globally to decrease carbon footprint and total power consumption up to 20% by 2020 [3]. Green Network planning optimizes the network by spatially distribute the base stations and adjust their transmission power and configuration such that the total power of transmission is minimized. As the QoS is the main concern of all mobile communication companies, green network planning should consider Quality of Service (QoS) in the planning process to ensure the compliance of the green network with the requirements of mobile communication standards. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a global term describing what is commercially known as 4G mobile broadband network. The ability of the operators to preserve higher peak throughputs during higher spectrum bandwidth is the key advantage of LTE networks over HSPA+. In order for an LTE network to main- tain high peak data rates in high spectrum bandwidth, it uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) for downlink. For uplink, however, it employs an approach known as Single Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) [4]. Similar to traditional networks, LTE base station power consumption compliance to the green network definition remains an open question. Varieties of optimization methods are developed for base station location problem in [5]–[13].The main distinction between the different methods is the objectives used which are based on the network requirements and the constraints imposed in the optimization criteria. Tabu search algorithm and GA are compared in [9] for optimization of the number of base stations deployed for a specific area. The main objective of their work is to reduce the number of base station while maintaining maximum number of users served. Both methods showed a satisfactory convergence with better optimization achieved from the Tabu search while GA provided faster solution. The same conclusion was drawn from [5] where GA, Tabu search and simulated annealing algorithms has been compared. In [6], different scenarios of optimization have been compared for optimizing the configuration of base stations for Single Frequency Networks (SFN) using GA.