Base Station Energy Efficiency Improvement for Next Generation Mobile Networks

As more and more Base Stations (BSs) are being deployed by mobile operators to meet the ever increasing data traffic, solutions have to be found to try and reduce BS energy consumption to make the BSs more energy efficient and to reduce the mobile networks' operational expenditure (OPEX) and carbon dioxide emissions. In this paper, a BS sleeping technology deployable in heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is proposed. The proposed scheme is validated by using extensive OMNeT++/SimuLTE simulations. From the simulations, it is shown that some lightly loaded micro BSs can be put to sleep in a HetNet when the network traffic is very low without compromising the QoS of the mobile network.