Cell division, migration and death for energy efficient 5G ultra-small cell networks

In this paper, a novel topology management scheme is proposed for 5G Small Cell Networks (SCNs). The scheme is based on cell division, migration and death dedicated to exploiting the sleep mode of base stations to reduce the number of active base stations in a SCN for energy saving. Direction Of Arrival is used in a distributed way to adapt networks to the dynamic traffic conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme saves 39% power at low traffic loads compared with no topology management. With the scheme, SCNs can react to various traffic loads and consequently can sustain at least 1.2 Gbps/km²/MHz traffic with low blocking probability. The proposed scheme is compared to an existing topology management scheme and demonstrated to attain similar performance while reducing information exchange overhead. The alternative configurations of the scheme are investigated and analyzed.