Energy-Efficient Stabilized Automatic Control for Multicore Baseband in Millimeter-Wave Systems

The fifth generation (5G) cellular network is upon us. Academia and Industry have intensively collaborated together to bring the power of 5G cellular networks to the masses, and now the 5G millimeterwave (mmWave) platforms come into being in the market. One of the most popular 5GmmWave platforms mounts the massive mmWave phased antenna arrays in order to transfer a huge number of bits in a second (e.g., more than ten gigabits-per-second) to the baseband in the platform. While exploiting chip multicore processors (CMPs) may be the best solution to process such huge data in the mmWave baseband platform, power dissipate by the CMPs should become critical. Starting from an intuition that utilizing all processors in every single time introduces inefficient energy consumption, this paper proposes an energy aware queue-stable control (EQC) algorithm to control the activation/deactivation of individual processors and antenna arrays for pursuing time average energy consumption minimization subject to the stability of queues in the 5G-mm Wave baseband. Results from intensive simulations based on realistic experimental setups demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed EQC that achieves significant energy savings while queue stability is maintained.