Two teletraffic-based schemes for energy saving in cellular networks with micro-cells

Abstract

The energy consumption of Base Stations (BSs) is known to constitute a major part of the power consumption in a cellular network. In this paper, we propose a novel approach which may switch a BS off under light traffic conditions in order to conserve the power consumption of such networks. More specifically, when the traffic load in the middle cell of a network with three micro-cells is sufficiently low, the corresponding BS can be switched off and its users will be covered by increasing the transmission power of one sector antenna in each of the two neighboring cells. Two teletraffic-based power saving schemes are proposed in our study. The first scheme analyzes the expected sojourn times of different channel occupancies and switches off the BS deterministically when the switching thresholds are met. The second scheme instead switches off the BS probabilistically based on a policy designed using a Finite Markov Decision Process (FMDP). Numerical results for the first scheme demonstrate that a reasonable amount of network power can be saved at the cost of slightly higher transmission power. The results for the second scheme indicate that a lower limit on the long-term network transmission power can be obtained using the FMDP-based analysis.