Security-Aware Base Station Sleeping Algorithm in Heterogeneous Networks

Switching underutilized base stations (BSs) to sleep mode is recognized as a promising approach to reduce the energy consumption of cellular networks, but it may lead to an increasing outage probability and severer eavesdropping effect on users depending on BSs cooperation. In order to secure users from eavesdropping, we propose a novel Security-aware BS Sleeping (SBSS) algorithm for heterogeneous networks. Our approach contains two scenarios. In the first scenario, the low-power BSs are sparsely deployed, while in the second one are opposite. In both scenarios, minimizing the system energy consumption and guaranteeing the system communication security need to be ensured. Our proposed algorithm achieves a significant power saving, meanwhile secures the system transmission.