A Traffic-Aware and Power-Saving base Station Switch off Method for Cellular Networks

With rapid surge in the number of mobile devices (MDs), demand for more data rates is increasing day by day. Providing connectivity to MDs and to meet the demand for high data rates under tremendous traffic is a bottleneck. To meet the demand for call connectivity and quality data services, there is a need to have more number of base stations (BSs) in a given area. In metropolitan areas, the distribution of load on these increased BSs drastically changes, since the MDs movement is highly dynamic and is a function of time. This heavily impacts the efficiency of the BSs due to non-uniform traffic at different times of the day which can be overcome by switching off a BS having low traffic and allocating the already connected MDs to its neighboring BSs. In this paper, we propose an efficient MD allocation model that continuously monitors the traffic across all the BSs in a cluster to switch off, identifies the BSs with traffic below some predefined threshold, and switches the MDs in these BSs to the neighboring base stations. Simulation results show a comprehensive improvement in power efficiency of the cellular network.