Regular and Static Sector-Based Cell Switch-Off Patterns

摘要

Energy saving in cellular networks can be achieved by implementing the cell switch-off (CSO) approach in periods of light traffic. Regular static CSO (CSO patterns) is a type of CSO where the set of active cells is predetermined such that they are located on a regular grid. It is known that regular cell layouts generally provide the best coverage and downlink SINR. Furthermore, CSO patterns assure that interfering cells are as far away as possible and help in modeling interference accurately. Existing lit- erature on CSO patterns focuses only on site-level CSO (switching off entire BSs); however, significant gains can sometimes be obtained from sector-level CSO patterns (switching off individual sectors). This paper is the first to introduce and investi- gate sector- based regular CSO patterns by providing illustrative examples. We compare the performances of different CSO patterns in terms of the number of supported users. Also, we analytically compare site- based versus sector-based CSO patterns in terms of power saving. Our results show that patterns with only one of the three sectors active (each with the same orientation) can support the most users per sector, due to a favourable interference situation.