Energy Efficiency in 5G IoT Networks

5G networks are expected in future to gain and provide significant levels of capacity, low latency (important for some Internet of Things (IoT) applications) and high reliability, but at increased infrastructure complexity and cost with low infrastructure utilisation in small cells. Small cells are expected to have low occupancy and low utilisation due to the transient movement of users and the small size of cells. This motivates in part the consideration of energy efficiency which may be low due to low equipment utilisaiton. Centeralisation of resources and resource sharing can improve energy efficiency and can enable improved resources scheduling to meet the random user demands and address at the same time the channel variation in space and time. This project will investigate these aspects with the aim of improving the network energy efficiency end-to-end especially when used for low latency IoT applications.