A Unified Base Station Switching Framework Considering Both Uplink and Downlink Traffic

This letter studies the dynamic operation of macro base stations (BSs) for potential energy savings. Unlike existing work in literature, most of which overlooked the importance of uplink (UL) traffic, we develop a generalized framework for a dynamic BS operation that not only considers the downlink (DL) traffic load but also the UL traffic load. The proposed BS switching sequential algorithm, which is built based on the generalized framework, is computationally efficient and easy to implement. Simulation results demonstrate that jointly handling UL and DL can provide more energy savings.