Grouping based power control for improving energy efficiency in dense small cell networks

Dense small cell networks (SCNs) has emerged as a cost-effective way of supporting a rapid growth of traffic demand. However, a large number of small cell base stations (SBSs) will consume a lot of energy, which is not conductive to improve the SCNs energy efficiency (EE). In this study, a novel small cell grouping based power control scheme is proposed to save energy as well as to maintain the network throughput for dense SCNs. Specifically, small cells are divided into different groups according to both the load and the inter-cell interference levels between the dense small cells, and accordingly the transmission power of the SBSs is reduced based on the proposed utility function. The existence of the optimal solutions to the problem is discussed, then the differential evolution (DE) is applied to obtain the optimal transmission power. System level simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the SCNs EE without sacrifice of the network throughput.