Energy-Efficient Power Control with Time-Domain Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks

Improving network Energy Efficiency (EE) in wireless communications has attracted increasing attention recently. The purpose of our research is to optimize the network power consumption and preserve the throughput of macrocells User Equipments (UEs) at the same time. We solve the problem by controlling the transmission power of macro base stations (BSs) in some subframes based on the proposed utility function, and accordingly scheduling picocells Cell Range Expansion (CRE) UEs in these subframes. The existence of the optimal solutions to the problem is discussed, then the Differential Evolution (DE) is applied to search the optimal transmission power which maximizes the proposed utility function. System level simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can not only optimize the network power consumption but also improve the throughput of the network, which will lead to the network EE improvement.