Energy-Aware Network Planning for Wireless Cellular System with Inter-Cell Cooperation

In traditional cellular networks, the network planning scheme is imperative for satisfying the coverage and traffic requirement. The rapidly growing number of users in today´s cellular networks demands more base stations (BSs) to accommodate the increasing traffic load. The dense deployment results in severe energy consumption, which is often overlooked by existing network planning schemes. In this paper, an energy-aware network planning scheme is proposed to reduce the energy consumption of BSs by leveraging the coverage extension functionality of the inter-cell cooperation. The network planning problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem, which is solved with the Lagrangian relaxation method. Numerical results show that the energy efficiency can be enhanced by as much as 20% compared with the non-cooperative scheme without violating the QoS requirement. It is also shown that the proposed scheme is robust to the energy consumption structure of the BSs, and thus can be used with various types of BSs.