User-aware cell switch-off algorithms

In recent years, energy efficiency (“greenness”) has become an important research topic in wireless networks. Environmental awareness and the increased cost of energy stimulate the research on this subject. In cellular networks, most of the power consumption takes place at the base stations (BSs). It is worth noting that the number of BSs has been steadily increasing since the 1G networks; moreover, this increase is expected to become even steeper in the foreseeable future with the advent of the small cell concept in the envisioned 5G networks. It is also worth noting that in cellular networks the traffic demand (load) in space and time is getting increasingly heterogeneous. As a result, parts of network will likely be lightly loaded at certain times. In such situations, it only makes sense to switch off as many BSs as possible without jeopardizing the key performance indicators. Although there in an increasing volume of literature on the cell switch-off (CSO) concept, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study which considers the user terminal (UT) power consumption as a key performance indicator, while the UT power efficiency indeed constitutes one of most important performance criterion in a mobile network. In many cases, switching off BSs for downlink energy efficiency may result in an uplink energy inefficiency, due to the fact that the UTs served by the switched off BSs will need to be connected to further away BSs. In this paper, we propose a heuristic CSO algorithm to achieve energy efficiency in the whole cellular network while taking into account the power consumption of UTs. We call the proposed algorithm as the user-aware CSO algorithm.