Coverage and capacity aware cell scaling in green cellular networks

Switching off base stations (BS) is an effective and efficient solution to energy saving in green cellular networks. The previous works focus mainly on when to switch off BSs based only on the amount of current traffic demands of active users. In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach by jointly considering the traffic load of active users and the coverage-hole problem in energy-efficient cellular networks. Our scheme consists of BS on/off decision making and a power control mechanism. We formulate this problem as a binary integer programming problem, and prove that it is NP-hard. We then propose a polynomial time heuristic for this problem. The simulation results show that our algorithm is indeed an efficient energy-saving, cell scaling algorithm which satisfies capacity and coverage requirements for cellular networks.