Base Station Sleeping Control with Energy-Stability Tradeoff in Centralized Radio Access Networks

Switching off some Base Stations (BSs) with low traffic is a promising approach to save energy in cellular networks. However, it should be noted that frequently switching BSs on/off will result in extra energy consumption, hardware booting delay, bad quality of services (QoS) and so on. Therefore, we propose a Centralized Sleeping Scheme (CSS) to consider the performance of BS state stability which is defined as the number of BS on/off state transitions. In the CSS, a bi-objective optimization problem is formulated to minimize the energy consumption and improve the BS state stability. A fast exhaustive algorithm (CSS-E) to obtain near- optimal solutions and a modified Particle Swarm Optimization (CSS-PSO) algorithm with low complexity are proposed to solve the bi-objective optimization problem. Simulation results show that the CSS-E and CSS-PSO can significantly outperform the traditional traffic aware sleeping scheme in the number of BSs state transitions while the performance difference in energy saving is small.