Greening Effect of Spatio-Temporal Power Sharing Policies in Cellular Networks with Energy Constraints

Greening effect in interference management (IM), a way of enhancing spectrum sharing via intelligent transmit power control, can be achieved by the fact that as BSs moderately reduce their transmit powers, the performance degradation decreases slower than linearly, yet a considerable overall energy saving is expected due to transmit powers' exerting influence on operational power. This paper investigates the impact of different spatial and/or temporal power sharing policies for a given system-wide power budget in IM schemes. We develop an optimization-theoretic IM framework on cellular network greening, from which we first develop four IM schemes governed by different power sharing: no sharing, only temporal sharing, only spatial sharing, and both spatial and temporal sharing. Through extensive simulations, including a real BS deployment in Manchester city, United Kingdom, we obtain the following interesting observations: (i) the gains both from performance and power saving are obtained by adopting the spatial and/or temporal power sharing policies, (ii) tighter greening regulation (i.e., smaller total power budget) leads to higher spatio-temporal power sharing gain than IM gain, (iii) spatial power sharing significantly excels temporal one in terms of power saving, and (iv) higher greening efficiency can be achieved as the cell size becomes smaller.