Energy efficient and delay aware ternary-state transceivers for aerial base stations

In recent times, Aerial Base Stations(AeBSs) are being investigated to provide wireless coverage to terrestrial radio terminals. There are many advantages of using aerial platforms to provide wireless coverage, including larger coverage in remote areas and better line-of-sight conditions etc. Energy is a scarce resource for the aerial base stations, hence the wise management of energy is quite beneficial for the aerial network. In this context, we study the means of reducing the total energy consumption by designing and implementing an energy efficient aerial base station as presented in this paper. Implementing the sleep mode in the Base Stations (BSs) has proven to be a very good approach for improving the energy efficiency and we propose a novel strategy for further improving energy efficiency by considering ternary state transceivers for an AeBSs. Using the three state model, we propose a Markovian Decision Process (MDP) based algorithm, which intelligently switches between three states of the transceivers based on the offered traffic meanwhile maintaining a prescribed minimum channel rate per user. We define a reward function for the MDP, which helps us to get an optimal policy for selecting a particular mode for the transceivers of the AeBS. Considering an aerial BS with transceivers whose states are changeable, we perform simulations to analyse the performance of the algorithm. Our results show that, compared with the always active model, around 40% gain in the energy efficiency is achieved by using our proposed MDP algorithm together with the three-state transceivers model. We also show the energy-delay tradeoff in order to design an efficient aerial base station.