On Optimal Cell Activation for Coverage Preservation in Green Cellular Networks

Energy-efficient base station (BS) operation is a key design goal in green cellular networks. An effective way for energy conservation of BSs is to switch BSs on/off according to the traffic profile. However, such operations may create coverage holes in the network. In this paper, we aim to minimize the total power consumption of the network by switching BSs on/off adaptively while maintaining the network coverage. We find that the BS activation problem for minimal network power consumption with full network coverage preservation is an NP-hard problem. To address the problem, we first derive the optimal cell size for minimizing BS power consumption per unit coverage area and propose a polynomial-time algorithm for energy-efficient BS activation. The simulation results show that our algorithm can approach the minimum network power consumption and adapt to network traffic load under non-uniform traffic load distributions. More importantly, we demonstrate that network densification with small cells for bursting throughput in hot spot areas can also be beneficial in saving network energy during the low traffic load period.