Greening cellular radio access networks: A numerical method for the selection of detachable base stations in low traffic scenarios

In the last years there had been several contributions about decreasing the energy consumption of communication networks. In mobile communication networks, the major part of the energy consumption incurs in the radio access network. In this paper we present a numerical method which finds the maximum subset of detachable ceils for a given base station topology. Additionally our algorithm calculates the antenna downtilt settings for the remaining cells to guarantee full network coverage. We evaluate our new method and the energy saving potentials by means of two German urban/suburban 3G mobile network scenarios and different mobile data services.