A system-level power saving approach for cellular networks with microcells/picocells

Network power consumption reduction has recently become an active research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to save power consumption of a three-cell microcellular network. When the traffic load in the middle cell is low, it can be switched-off and its users are covered. This is enabled by increasing the transmission power of one sector antenna in the two neighboring cells. Numerical results show that by increasing antenna transmission power of the two sectors, the overall network power consumption can be reduced.