Profit-aware base station operation for green cellular networks

With the rapid growth of mobile data traffic, operators are expected to densely deploy base stations to meet user demands. Recent researches have indicated that the densely deployed base stations lead to the significant increase of the operational expenses of operators due to the electricity bills to maintain their operation, and thus the profit of operators is greatly decreased. Different from the past works in dynamically switching on/off base stations for energy saving, we propose to consider the benefits of users in service fee discounts as a joint optimization process in cutting down the energy consumption of base stations to maximize the total profit of operators. The optimization problem is formulated and shown being NP-hard. We then propose a profit-aware algorithm to switch off base stations, as needed, with the adjustment of the data rates provided to the users who are willing to receive discounts. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly increase the total profit of operators and introduce a win-win situation to both users and operators.