Dynamic cell reconfiguration framework for energy conservation in cellular wireless networks

Several energy saving techniques in cellular wireless networks such as active base station (BS) selection, transmit power budget adaptation and user association have been studied independently or only part of these aspects have been considered together in literature. In this paper, we jointly tackle these three problems and propose an integrated framework, called dynamic cell reconfiguration (DCR). It manages three techniques operating on different time scales for ultimate energy conservation while guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) level of users. Extensive simulations under various configurations, including the real dataset of BS topology and utilization, demonstrate that the proposed DCR can achieve the performance close to an optimal exhaustive search. Compared to the conventional static scheme where all BSs are always turned on with their maximum transmit powers, DCR can significantly reduce energy consumption, e.g., more than 30% and 50% savings in uniform and non-uniform traffic distribution, respectively.