Cooperation-enabled energy efficient base station management for dense small cell networks

Dense small cell networks are deployed for future wireless communication to meet the ever-increasing mobile traffic demand. However, network densification will significantly increase the energy budget and lead to energy inefficiency due to the constant operation of network hardware. In this paper, we consider cooperation-enabled dynamic base station (BS) management for downlink dense small cell networks. By introducing two traffic-aware sleep modes, i.e., deep sleep mode and opportunistic sleep mode which are operating in different time and energy consumption scales, the network hardwares are turned to be the resources that can be occupied and released dynamically. Small cell BSs (SBSs) with zero or low load are completely switched off and reside in deep sleep mode during a predefined time interval. At each time slot, SBS dynamically turn some antennas and associated physical components into opportunistic sleep mode according to the short term traffic distribution, and the users are jointly served by the remaining antennas via cooperative transmission. The corresponding sleep mode decision making are presented respectively to find the optimal number of SBS and antennas that should be switched off. Numerical results are then presented to illustrate the superior performance in terms of energy efficiency gain. In summary, the proposed cooperation-aided sleep strategies for dense small cell networks take both traffic features and optimal cooperative transmission into account, and can achieve great energy saving while maintaining required quality of service.