Base station switching with CoMP in cellular networks

Abstract

Base station switching (BSS) during low traffic load can ensure significant reduction in energy consumption of a cellular network. However, it has been shown that BSS can result in loss of coverage, specially in the uplink. Hence, in this paper, we consider coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission and reception to compensate for the loss in coverage due to BSS. We formulate the BSS with CoMP as an optimization problem. We numerically compute the optimization problem and present simulation results that show significant improvement in uplink coverage for BSS with CoMP. The improved coverage ensures more base stations can be switched off in BSS with CoMP in comparison to BSS without CoMP. Further, with suitable scheduling schemes, we show that BSS with CoMP does not result in significant loss in overall network throughput performance. Hence, BSS with CoMP can ensure in more energy savings without compromising on the network throughput performance.