Cooperation Management Among Base Stations Based on Cells Switch-Off for a Green LTE Cellular Network

The sudden increase in subscribers and demand for high-speed data has prompted cellular operators to increase the number of base stations to fulfill the needs of mobile subscribers. This increase has subsequently increased the overall energy consumption, operational costs and carbon footprint of cellular networks. Accordingly, improving the energy efficiency of wireless networks has become a compelling challenge for researchers, vendors, and mobile operators, not only to reduce the operational costs, but to also reduce the environmental effects. The focus is on creating green cellular networks at base stations because base stations consume most of the energy. In this paper, we investigate how much energy is saved based on a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network by reducing the number and size of active macro-cells according to traffic load conditions. The proposed methodology is simulated on a set of real-sized LTE networks. The simulation results show that there are savings of up to 48 % in terms of both energy savings and operational expenditure with a 90 % cell coverage condition.