Pivoting on the spatial dimension for mobile telecom energy-saving

Improving energy efficiency is vital for the 5G mobile telecommunication network, while the conventional temporal shutdown strategy is exhausting its energy-saving potential. Inspired by the symmetricity between the temporal peaks and valleys and the geographical hot and cold-spots in network traffic, we propose a new strategy for telecom energy-saving which matches the base station cells with traffic hotspots as much as possible to reduce waste. We showed deductively and empirically that the probability density function of the spatial distribution of network traffic typically has a steep power-law form, which gives rise to temporally stable traffic hotspot areas that occupies only about 13% of the space and also have proper sizes suitable for spatial optimization. A simplified model hence built yields up to 19.59% energy savings for the 4G network, and 29.68% for a hypothetical 5G network, prominent margins over what the temporal shutdown approach would gain.