Energy and Throughput Trade-Offs in Cellular Networks Using Base Station Switching

Base station operation consumes a lot of energy, a considerable amount of which can be saved by switching off base stations during low user demand (for example, at night). Base station switching (BSS) can result in loss in coverage if not performed properly. We show that coverage is closely related to scheduling via power management and that the bottleneck is typically the uplink. To save energy, we propose a set of BSS patterns, at a global system-level, that have the potential to provide full coverage if the appropriate schedulers are used. We further show that the existing benchmark uplink scheduling schemes do not provide full coverage when BSS is used in urban as well as rural macro-cell environments (the downlink benchmark scheduling scheme provides full coverage only for some of the BSS patterns). Hence, we propose novel scheduling schemes for both uplink and downlink that realistically model interference, ensure full coverage, and provide good energy-performance trade-offs for the proposed BSS patterns. We also present a low complexity high performance heuristic for the proposed uplink scheduler. Finally, we show the presented models and results can be used to quantify, offline, the energy-performance trade-offs under different operating scenarios.