Traffic-aware base station sleeping in dense cellular networks

The energy consumption of information and communication technology (ICT) industry has become a serious problem, which mostly comes from the network infrastructure, rather than the mobile terminals. In this paper, we consider densely deployed cellular networks where the coverage of base stations (BSs) overlaps and the traffic intensity varies over time and space. An energy saving algorithm is proposed by dynamically adjusting the working modes (active or sleeping) of BSs according to the traffic variation with respect to certain blocking probability requirement. In addition, to prevent frequent mode switching, BSs are set to hold their current working modes for at least a given interval. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed strategy can greatly reduce energy consumption with blocking probability guarantee, and the performance is insensitive to the mode holding time within certain range.