Energy efficient small cell operation under ultra dense cloud radio access networks

Deploying dense small cells is an emerging approach to improve network throughput by providing proximate hotspot access to users. Small cell enhancement is considered as one of the hot topics in 3GPP LTE Release 12. One of the important aspects in the small cell study is how to ensure efficient small cell operation by switching on/off small cells. This paper analyzes different small cell on/off schemes. The benefits of small cell on/off and adaptive baseband unit sharing under ultra dense networks (UDN) with centralized/cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture are evaluated in terms of both throughput increase and energy saving.