Energy Savings Modeling and Performance Analysis in Multi-Power-State Base Station Systems

Continuously growing energy consumption in cellular networks motivates the research towards energy saving approaches. Among previous work, many studies suggest different base station shutdown strategies to reduce the transmission power in case of low or no traffic. Besides the strategy that shutdown base stations completely, our work suggests and evaluates the usage of partial shutdown strategy for multi-antenna base station systems, which allows a better adaptation of power to the network traffic which required by the users. We use Markov Chain to model user traffic and select appropriate state between different power-states of the multi-antenna base station. We evaluate the dependency of the energy saving on the number of antennas and the radius of cells, preserving the coverage of a certain region. The results show that systems with higher number of antennas can better adapt the power to the user traffic requirements. Further, we search for optimal cell radius, showing that it has more important role in case of higher user traffic.