Energy-Efficient Base Station Sleep Scheduling in Relay-Assisted Cellular Networks

We Relay-assisted cellular network architecture has been developed to cover cell-edge users and to improve capacity. However, the deployment of relay stations (RSs) in cellular networks may increase the total energy consumption. Though energy efficiency has become a major concern in cellular networks, little work has studied the energy efficiency of relay-assisted cellular networks by sleep scheduling. In this paper, a distributed base stations (BSs) sleep scheduling scheme in relay-assisted cellular networks is proposed. The goal is to maximize the energy efficiency under the spectral efficiency constraint. Firstly, whether the BSs should be sleeping or active is determined by the traffic profile. Then, the transmission powers of the active BSs are optimized within the game-theoretic framework, by using an interior-point method, so as to maximize the energy efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is superior to that turning on all the BSs without sleep scheduling.