Power Savings with CoMP Technology in Cellular Networks

With the rapid growth of network infrastructure, the power-efficiency of cellular networks has become an important problem. In this paper, we propose a power-savings scheme that turns off lightly-loaded base stations (BSs) and switches the clients/users of the powered-off BSs to their neighbor BSs by utilizing the Coordinate Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission technology. In order to guarantee the users' QoS, the CoMP cluster should cover the switched-off BSs, and each coordinated BS in the CoMP cluster should have enough radio resources. Our in-depth simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves near-optimal power savings and improves the power-efficiency up to 35%.