A spectrum efficient base station switching-off mechanism for green cellular networks

Abstract

Growing demands for mobile services in recent years has extraordinary increased the number of cellular operators and consequently the portion of energy that is consumed by cellular networks. Hence, green cellular network has been introduced, which suggests the use of energy optimization methods in cellular networks. One of the solutions to optimize the energy consumption of cellular networks is to switch on/off base stations with low traffic demand. Previous works on cell switching usually do not address the spectrum efficiency and QoS of users in their methods. In this paper, a cell switching method is proposed on the basis of a baseline method which considers the spectrum efficiency and QoS of users in reallocation of radio resources after switching off a base station. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the energy consumption and improves spectrum efficiency compared to baseline method.