Greedy search algorithm based two stage energy saving technique for dense LTE-A HetNets

In the near future, because of its growing popularity and improved support for increased traffic demands from subscribers, a very dense deployment of small cells is expected in LTE-Advanced heterogeneous networks (HetNets). While this kind of deployment is expected to prepare LTE-A networks to serve the subscribers better, it will further increase their energy consumption thereby raising the carbon footprint on the environment. Hence, there is a rising need to design energy saving mechanisms for dense LTE-A HetNets. In this work, we propose a novel two stage technique to opportunistically minimize the count of base stations in a dense LTE-A HetNet, required to serve the users traffic, whose schedule is obtained from any scheduling policy that the network employs, in every scheduling interval. We employ a greedy algorithm to minimize the count of the base stations in each scheduling interval. The proposed algorithm is shown to have a polynomial time complexity making it a viable solution for the scheduling time resolution that LTE-A employs. Extensive simulations show that the proposed technique results in substantial energy saving under various traffic conditions and base stations density.