Base-Station Duty-Cycling and Traffic Buffering as a Means to Achieve Green Communications

In this paper, we propose the Base-Station (BS) Discontinuous Transmission (DTX) as the means for saving energy. Traditional proposals utilize DTX at the BS to enable sleep modes under lightly loaded scenarios. However, we propose to shape the traffic to enable more frequent sleep modes at the BS, while ensuring the QoS requirements in terms of application delay are successfully met. The results show that our DTX proposal has a significant potential even under moderately loaded scenarios. The system Energy Efficiency (EE) gain is achieved in our proposal by exploiting the classical Energy-delay tradeoff. We show the performance of our scheme in the presence of realistic system power models proposed within the framework of EARTH project.