A novel BS power saving scheme with virtual coverage management for green heterogeneous LTE networks

Green radio technology for energy saving is one of important issues in future cellular networks. Two power saving schemes have been previously introduced to enhance the energy saving efficiency for green cellular networks, in which the cell zooming scheme and the cell wilting and blossoming scheme require organic operations between cells in the cellular networks. With the previous power saving schemes, inorganic operations of a serving cell and neighboring cells could cause coverage holes between the cells, thereby seriously degrading the power saving efficiency as well as the quality of service. In this paper, we propose a novel base station (BS) power saving scheme for green heterogeneous LTE cellular networks, in which the networks virtually adjusts the coverage of a serving macrocell (SM) and neighboring macrocells (NMs) without adjusting the transmission power of BSs when the SM is lightly loaded and turns off the SM when none of active users are associated with the SM. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the power saving efficiency without causing system throughput degradation. In particular, with the proposed scheme macrocells are allowed to operate independently without concurrent operation of SM and NMs for green heterogeneous cellular networks.