A Load-Balancing Energy Consumption Minimization Scheme in 5G Heterogeneous Small Cell Wireless Networks Under Coverage Probability Analysis

Abstract

Heterogeneous small cell networks (HSCN), as a promising paradigm to increase end-user data rates and improve the overall capacity, is expected to be a key cellular architecture in 5G wireless networks. However, energy consumed in HSCN is considerable due to the massive use of small cells. In this paper, we investigate the energy consumption issue which stems from the enormous number of running small cell base stations (SBSs) deploying in the HSCN. We first propose power consumption models so as to characterize the active state and the idle state of SBSs, respectively. Then two sleep modes for SBSs tier, i.e. random sleep mode and load-awareness dynamic sleep mode, are proposed. The random sleep is designed based on a binomial distribution of the SBS operation probability. Through the analysis on activeness of SBSs, we define the operation probability for the SBS applying the proposed dynamic sleep mode is associated to its traffic load level. The closed-form expressions of success probability for coverage, which is used to decide whether an active user can connect to a SBS successfully, are derived for the proposed sleep modes. Energy consumption minimizations are presented for the two proposed sleep modes under the success probability constraint. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed two sleep modes. Different energy saving gains can be achieved via using of the energy saving strategy. The superior of the dynamic sleep mode by comparing the random sleep is also verified in terms of energy consumption, success probability and power efficiency.