DeCoNet: Density Clustering-Based Base Station Control for Energy-Efficient Cellular IoT Networks

Recently, there has been a rapid increase in the number of (small-cell) base stations (BSs) to support the massive amount of mobile data traffic and rapidly increasing number of mobile devices in beyond 5G (B5G) wireless communication systems or Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, many of these BSs tend to waste a considerable amount of energy to support such data traffic and mobile devices. Therefore, the development of an efficient BS status control algorithm is important for realizing energy-efficient IoT networks. To reduce network energy consumption, we herein propose a density clustering-based BS control algorithm for energy-efficient IoT networks (DeCoNet). DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) and OPTICS (Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure) are utilized for partitioning high and low user-density regions. To find the effective number of BSs and their appropriate locations considering user-density differences, we utilize parameters obtained after applying density clustering algorithms to derive the thinning radius that is used to adjust the status of BSs in overall cellular IoT networks. Specifically, the average reachability-distance of each cluster in OPTICS and the distance between the outermost border users of each cluster in DBSCAN are used to obtain the radius of each cluster region. Through extensive computer simulations, we show that the proposed algorithms outperform the conventional algorithms in terms of average area throughput, energy efficiency, energy per information bit, and power consumption per unit area.