Use of CoMP in 4G cellular networks for increased network energy efficiency

The rapidly increasing penetration of smart phones and the associated exponential growth in the wireless data traffic result in an increasing energy consumption and, consequently, greater carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, on account of operational costs and environmental worries, this increase should be taken into consideration for future cellular networks evolution. In this paper, we study the performance of several methods that improve the energy efficiency of wireless networks. In particular, we investigate some solutions found in the literature, namely sleep mode and cell zooming. We see that a drawback of sleep mode is an increase in the outage probability, and we propose the use of Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) to mitigate this problem, such that the combination of these techniques reduces the energy consumption while maintaining the cellular network quality.