Green Optimization Schemes for Mobile Network Design and Operation Angelos Rouskas 1 • Georgios Kyriazis 1 • Dimitris I. Komnakos 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract Mobile telecommunication’s operation power cost occupies a large portion in net- work operators OPEX list. Recent research efforts on energy efficient design and optimization of the radio access network focus on applicable solutions that decrease the energy consumption of the vast number of radio base stations (BSs), mostly because of the economic and envi- ronmental consequences of their operation. In this work, we formulate the power consumption optimization problem in mobile networks and propose two energy efficient heuristic schemes to determine the optimal subset of available BSs that should be active in order to serve a certain load of UEs, without violating QoS requirements for each user served. We exploit the results of this formulation setup and further propose a BS activation scheme to produce proper BS activation profiles for continuous time operation in the same network deployment under various user traffic demands. The results indicate that our proposed BS optimization and activation schemes achieve significant energy savings compared to ordinary network operation Keywords Energy efficiency  Network design  Wireless networks  Green communications  Base station activation scheme  Consumption reduction 1 Introduction As our society strives for environmentally friendly solutions, during the last decade green technologies are widely adopted and new technologies are being evaluated based on their carbon footprint. In this context, mobile telecommunications industry is considering ways & Angelos Rouskas arouskas@unipi.gr Georgios Kyriazis gkyriazi@unipi.gr Dimitris I. Komnakos dkomna@unipi.gr 1 Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, 80, Karaoli & Dimitriou Str., 18534 Piraeus, Attica, Greece 123 Wireless Pers Commun DOI 10.1007/s11277-017-4350-9