An Algorithmic Perspective of Base Station Switching in Dense Cellular Networks

The cellular industry has seen an unprecedented growth during the last decade due to the increasing number of smart" devices, tablets and other mobile-connected products and the deployment of new technologies that allow for better connection speeds. However, the network equipment of the cellular sector is negatively affecting our environment due to their carbon emissions and traffic-insensitive power consumption model. This can be attributed to the fact that the base stations have been provisioned for peak load without any consideration on the current traffic. Therefore during the periods of low/zero traffic, the base stations remain unused and their power is wasted. The proposed system aims at switching on/off the base station based on the user data traffic variations in a densely deployed cellular network. The overlapping coverage area is assumed to avoid network holes. The polynomial time heuristic algorithm used switches the central cell in a cluster size of n to sleep mode during low data traffic period. By using the stepwise decrease/increase of base station power, the handovers are executed in steps. The inactive base station is switched on when the number of user traffic suddenly peaks in the neighboring cells during early morning hours. Through analysis of the simulation results, for the LTE model it can be stated that the central cell switch off yields an energy savings of approx. 14% during periods of below-threshold traffic, but the modulation and coding changes to QPSK during the period of switch off.