Breathe to stay cool: adjusting cell sizes to reduce energy consumption

Abstract

Reducing the energy consumption of a wireless cellular network is an important and urgent problem. This paper studies the effect of cell sizes on the energy consumed by the network, assuming base station technologies of today and the future. Making cell sizes too small or too large can significantly increase energy consumption. We show that the optimal cell size from an energy perspective depends on a number of factors, including base station technology, data rates, and traffic demands. Given that traffic varies significantly during a day, dynamically adjusting cell sizes can help reduce energy consumption. We propose a practical, 2-level scheme that adjusts cell sizes between two fixed values, and show an energy saving of up to 40%. The paper also proposes some self-organizing techniques to allow this dynamic cell size adjustment.