Dissertation in the field of Communications Engineering, Athul Prasad
The title of thesis is Enabling Energy-Efficient and Backhaul-aware Next Generation Heterogeneous Networks
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The data rate requirements of wireless network end users have been increasing exponentially over the recent years, and this trend is expected to continue in future as well. Network densification through the deployment of heterogeneous access points is considered as a key enabler to satisfy the target network capacity re-quirements. This makes the study of the energy efficient operation of such dense heterogeneous networks, which is the main focus of this work, an important topic.
The key problem addressed in this work is whether the power consumption of the nodes in a heterogeneous mobile network can be reduced with relaxed opera-tional constraints, without having significant impacts on the network capacity. From a mobile device perspective, mechanisms for optimizing cell or device dis-covery and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) operation in a constrained non-ideal network were investigated. Joint optimization of small cell and backhaul power consumption in order to achieve network power savings, was also studied. Network protocol enhancements were evaluated using system level simulations emulating realistic network deployment scenarios. It was shown that significant energy saving gains can be obtained with the investigated methods.
Opponent: Dr. Janne Peisa, Ericsson Research, Finland
Supervisor: Professor Olav Tirkkonen, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Communications and Networking