Energy-Efficient 5G Integrated Access and Backhaul Open RAN-Based Fixed Wireless Access Provisioning in Rural Areas

Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) has emerged as a promising solution for providing Internet access to rural areas where fiber deployment is not economically feasible. Recently, 5G-based FWA has been demonstrated to offer high coverage and capacity using mid and high-frequency bands. However, these bands require more radio units to increase capacity and coverage. Additionally, 5G-based FWA necessitates the deployment of edge clouds for proximity computation and hosting network functions. However, deploying more radios and leveraging edge cloud infrastructure can increase the network’s energy consumption. Therefore, such 5G-based FWA should be designed and powered by renewable energy to be sustainable and cost-efficient in rural areas. To address these challenges, we propose energy-efficient 5G Integrated Access and Backhaul Open Radio Access Network-based FWA (5G IAB and Open RAN-based FWA) serving rural areas, where Open RAN supports the interoperability of 5G-based FWA elements. We design an energy model that leverages the power grid and renewable energy to serve IAB and Open RAN-based FWA. We join the communication model with the energy model. Then, we formulate a joint optimization problem to minimize energy consumption while maximizing communication utility. We propose concave programming and disciplined convex programming as solutions. The results show that our approach can increase network and energy utility by leveraging renewable energy.