Multi-cell cooperation energy saving solution: An operator´s perspective

LTE networks sometimes use Evolved-Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN) cells for capacity enhancement, overlaying existing UMTS or GSM legacy Radio Access Technologies (RAT). While sophisticated single basestation (BS) energy saving mechanisms such as symbol, carrier, or antenna shutoff have been applied to current networks, there are limited saving gains due to various implementation methods of the Venders. This paper takes a system wide approach where selected BSs are turned off in the network in a coordinated manner and the corresponding users are distributed among the remaining active BSs (no hardware modifications). A mathematical model are built to formulate the problem, the heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the user reallocating problem. Simulation results demonstrate that dynamically reallocating users and turning off unnecessary BSs can reduce the energy consumption of the network by up to 35% in low-load conditions, while guaranteeing the required Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning.