Switch-Off Transients in Cellular Access Networks with Sleep Modes

The introduction of sleep modes in the operations of base stations is today considered one of the most promising approaches to reduce the energy consumption of cellular access networks. Several papers have considered this option, assuming that the switch-on and switch-off transients are of negligible duration. In this paper we study the switch-off transients for one cell, investigating the amount of time necessary to implement the switch-off, while allowing terminals to handover to a new BS without overloading the signaling channels, and we show that the switch-off times have a marginal impact on the energy savings achievable with the sleep mode scheme.