On the energy efficiency of base station sleeping with multicell cooperative transmission

Switching underutilized base stations (BSs) to sleep mode is recognized as a promising approach to reduce energy consumption of cellular networks, but it may increase the transmit power of remaining active BSs to guarantee service coverage. Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) can effectively reduce transmit power of BSs through BS cooperation but requiring extra power consumption due to extra signal processing and backhaul traffic. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency of BS sleeping combined with CoMP. A joint power and subcarrier allocation algorithm is proposed to minimize the overall network power consumption with minimum data rate constraints, which can be implemented distributedly across multiple clusters. Simulation results show that BS sleeping combined with CoMP can improve network energy efficiency for high data rate users compared with Non-CoMP systems without BS sleeping.