A Novel Power-Efficient BS Operation Scheme for Green Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Abstract

Power-efficient base station (BS) operation is one of the important issues in future green cellular networks. Previously well-known BS operation schemes, the cell zooming scheme and the cell wilting and blossoming scheme, require tight cooperation between cells in cellular networks. With the previous schemes, the non-cooperative BSs of a serving cell and neighboring cells could cause coverage holes between the cells, thereby seriously degrading the quality of service as well as the power saving efficiency of the cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a novel power-efficient BS operation scheme for green downlink heterogeneous cellular networks, in which the networks virtually adjust the coverage of a serving macrocell (SM) and neighboring macrocells (NMs) without adjusting the transmission power of the BSs when the SM is lightly loaded, and the networks turn off the BS of the SM when none of active users are associated with the SM. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme significantly improves the power saving efficiency without degrading the quality of service (e.g., system throughput) of a downlink heterogeneous LTE network and outperforms the previous schemes in terms of system throughput and power saving efficiency. In particular, with the proposed scheme, macrocells are able to operate independently without the cooperation of a SM and NMs for green heterogeneous cellular networks.