Downlink Performance of Cellular Systems With Base Station Sleeping, User Association, and Scheduling

Base station (BS) sleeping has emerged as a viable solution to enhance the overall network energy efficiency by inactivating the underutilized BSs. However, it affects the performance of users in sleeping cells depending on their BS association criteria, their channel conditions toward the active BSs, and scheduling criteria and traffic loads at the active BSs. This paper characterizes the performance of cellular systems with BS sleeping by developing a systematic framework to derive the spectral efficiency and outage probability of downlink transmission to the sleeping cell users taking into account the aforementioned factors. In this context, a user association scheme is also developed in which sleeping cell users associate to a BS with maximum mean channel access probability (MMAP). The MMAP-based user association scheme adapts according to traffic load and scheduling criteria at the active BSs. We consider greedy and round-robin schemes at active BSs for scheduling users in a channel. We also derive the analytical results for the conventional maximum received signal power (MRSP)-based user association scheme. Finally, we derive the statistics of the received signal and interference power to evaluate the downlink spectral efficiency of a given sleeping cell user. Numerical results provide a comparison between two user association schemes as a function of system parameters and demonstrate the efficacy of the MMAP-based association scheme in non-uniform traffic load scenarios.