Random multicell topology adjustment for greening cellular networks

Abstract

While the deployment of base stations (BSs) becomes increasingly dense in order to accommodate the growth in traffic demand, these BSs may be under-utilized during most hours except peak hours. The deactivation of these under-utilized BSs is regarded as the key to reducing network power consumption; however, the remaining active BSs should increase their transmit power in order to fill network coverage holes that result from BS switching off. This paper investigates the optimal balance between such beneficial and harmful effects of BS switching off in terms of minimizing the network power consumption, through comprehensively considering the spatial BS distribution, BS transmit power, BS power consumption behaviors, radio propagation environments, and frequency reuse. The suboptimal and approximated design problems are formulated as geometric programming and the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed suboptimal solutions for the spatial density, transmit power, and frequency reuse of remaining active BSs significantly contribute to reducing the power consumption of BSs.