Traffic-aware relay sleep control for joint macro-relay network energy efficiency

With the ever growing demand of data applications, the joint macro-relay networks are emerging as a promising heterogeneous deployment to provide coverage extension and throughput enhancement. However, the current cellular networks are usually designed to be performance-oriented without enough considerations on the traffic variation, causing substantial energy waste. In this paper, we consider a joint macro-relay network with densely deployed relay stations (RSs), where the traffic load varies in both time and spatial domains. An energy-efficient scheme is proposed to dynamically adjust the RS working modes (active or sleeping) according to the traffic variations, which is called traffic-aware relay sleep control (TRSC). To evaluate the performance of TRSC, we establish an analytical model using stochastic geometry theory and derive explicit expressions of coverage probability, mean achievable rate and network energy efficiency (NEE). Simulation results demonstrate that the derived analytic results are reasonable and the proposed TRSC can significantly improve the NEE when the network traffic varies dynamically.