Energy Saving in Ultra Dense Network via Dynamic Base Station Sleeping Combined with Interference Mitigation

Abstract

Ultra dense network is envisioned as a promising solution to meet the exponential growth of mobile data traffic. However, with the increasing density of small cells, the strength of inter-cell interference increases as well, which generates negative influence on the network performance. Since access networks are designed to support peak load, the utilization of base station can be inefficient most of the time which will result in a huge waste of energy. In this paper, we combine the base station sleeping with interference mitigation to address these issues. In our algorithm, we take advantage of the characteristic that the data traffic can tolerate a certain delay to mitigate interference. Therefore, base stations can be in sleep mode for a longer time while guaranteeing users’ minimal average transmission rate requirements. We also adopt the base station clustering to reduce the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme can greatly reduce the energy consumption.