Green communications in LTE networks with environmentally friendly small cell base stations

Green communications in LTE networks with environmentally friendly small cell base stations (BSs) are investigated. An approach to reassign mobile users to different LTE BSs is proposed. The objective is to achieve energy savings by switching off macrocell BSs and offloading the traffic to small cell BSs having a lower operating cost, or powered by renewable energy sources, without compromising the tolerable outage rate in the network. The proposed approach takes into account the uplink and downlink directions, intercell interference, scheduling, and base station operating costs. The proposed method was studied via simulations under different quality-of-service requirements in the uplink and downlink. The results show that significant gains can be achieved by the proposed approach.