Semi-Static ON/OFF Switching Schemes for Energy Efficient Phantom Cellular Networks

Phantom cellular networks are the key enabling technology that can increase the capacity of cellular networks by adding a new data plane to an existing macro cell control plane. In this paper, performance of Energy Harvesting (EH) enabled phantom cells operating under a macro cell is analyzed in terms of sum capacity and energy efficiency (EE). The Phantom Base Stations (PBSs) provide capacity gains by offloading users from Macro Base Station (MBS). However, due to the reuse of the same resource blocks by all PBSs, co-channel interference exists between PBSs, which limits the capacity gains. Furthermore, an excessive amount of energy is consumed by the PBSs to overcome this co-channel interference. To minimize the above mentioned capacity limiting problem of co-channel interference and energy consumption, semi-static ON/OFF switching schemes are evaluated. Interference Aware (IA) and Traffic Aware (TA) ON/OFF switching schemes are compared with Random ON/OFF and macro cell only schemes. Simulation results show that when the numbers of offloaded users are high, the TA scheme performs better in terms of capacity, with energy savings up to 90%. For both the IA and TA switching schemes, the gains are dependent on user distribution within the network.