A Scheduling Algorithm of Cell Zooming for Energy Efficiency in Disasters

Nowadays, many base stations (BSs) are equipped with batteries to provide services even during blackouts due to severe events such as disasters. In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm to adjust cell sizes, aka cell zooming, of battery-operated BSs in order for efficient use of energy. Our goal is to balance the tradeoff between user coverage and battery lifetime. For this purpose, we define the energy efficiency as user coverage per energy and maximize the efficiency under the assumption that future user distribution is roughly given. We propose a greedy algorithm to solve the problem that is formulated as an integer linear programming problem. The simulation results show that user coverage increases by 17% compared with the case without cell zooming.