Toward 5G: A Novel Sleeping Strategy for Green Distributed Base Stations in Small Cell Networks

Confronted with the rapidly increasing demand of mobile traffic and heavy energy consumption on base stations (BSs), the base station (BS) sleeping strategy becomes a promising method to promote the system energy efficiency (EE). To switch off the redundant small-cell base stations (s-BSs) without whittling down the network EE in small cell networks, we propose a novel environment-friendly distributed BS sleeping strategy, which consists of two parts, matching and connecting between the s-BSs and the user equipments (UEs), and activating the BS-turning-off procedure for the further promotion of EE. An initializing matching connection algorithm (IMCA) is proposed for the first subproblem and the energy efficiency ratio (EER) obtained by this proposed IMCA surpasses the EE gained from traditional initializing random connection method. Moreover, a turn-off if possible algorithm (TIPA) is proposed as the sleeping strategy to handle the BS-turning-off procedure. Both the EE and the convergence speed obtained by the sleeping deployment using TIPA surpass those of the traditional best response algorithm.