Energy-Efficient Base Station Control Framework for 5G Cellular Networks Based on Markov Decision Process

We study the problem of base station (BS) dynamic switching for energy efficient design of fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks and beyond. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and use an approximation method known as policy rollout to solve it. This method employs Monte Carlo sampling to approximate the Q-value. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to design an energy-efficient BS control algorithm. We design an MDP-based algorithm to control the on/off switching of BSs in real time; we exploit user mobility and location information in the selection of the optimal control actions. We start our formulation with the simple case of one-user one-ON. We then gradually and systematically extend this formulation to the multi-user multi-ON scenario. Simulation results show the potential of our novel approach of exploiting user mobility information within the MDP framework to achieve significant energy savings while providing quality-of-service guarantees.