A QoE-orientated base station sleeping strategy for multi-services in cellular networks

Energy efficiency and green communication have been a hot research topic in ICT industry recently. For cellular networks, the energy cost of base stations (BSs) makes a huge proportion of the total cost. This paper concentrates on finding an approach to shut down BSs with low traffic load from active mode to sleeping mode. QoE, instead of QoS, is guaranteed in this paper. Since different service types result in different QoEs, this paper takes three typical services into account: voice call, file downloading and video streaming. A dynamic programming switching algorithm is proposed to decide the switching strategy. To reduce the algorithm´s state space, several approximations are made based on the idea of “equivalent state”. Simulation results demonstrate the high performance of this algorithm.