Exploiting user delay-tolerance to save energy in cellular network: An analytical approach

The network reconfiguration (NR) techniques are key strategies to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks. In this paper we propose a mechanism to further increase the energy gains resulting of the application of these strategies. Our approach exploits the delay tolerance of the users to increase the periods when no reconfiguration is needed. We developed the analytical model of the mechanism dynamics and we evaluated it numerically for two NR strategies. The results show up to 13 percentage points of performance improvement regarding the traditional NR strategies for a maximal delay of 50s.