The Impact of Mobile Offloading on Energy Consumption and Capacity of Radio Access Networks – Case of Finland

The Finnish Mobile Operators face two main challenges: (i) mobile data subscriptions penetration and traffic are experiencing rapid growth; and (ii) government intervenes in the market to attain contradictory goals related to extensive high-speed mobile networks and energy consumption reduction. The mobile operators have to increase the capacity in their networks, taking energy efficiency into account. The reduction of energy consumption in mobile networks results to the reducing carbon emissions, and possibly to cost savings. The purpose of this study is to investigate the wide-to-local area offloading in urban regions in Finland and examine the impact of such a network on the wide area access network in terms of energy and capacity. The results show that the capacity relief ranges from 9.7 to 38.7 %, depending on the penetration of local area service, but the energy savings in macro cellular network are negligible.