Energy-efficient cellular network operation via base station cooperation

The rising cost of energy and increased environmental awareness have sparked a keen interest in the development and deployment of energy-efficient communication technologies. The energy efficiency of cellular networks can be increased significantly by selectively switching off some of the base stations (BSs) during periods of low traffic load. In this paper, we propose a scalable BS switching strategy and use cooperative communications and power control to extend network coverage to the service areas of the switched-off BSs. The outage probability and the achievable power savings of the proposed scheme are analyzed, both analytically and numerically, and a potential of up to 50% power saving is observed in the numerical results.