The energy consumption of Base Stations (BSs) isknown to constitute a major part of the power consumptionin a cellular network. In this paper, we propose a novelapproach which may switch a BS off under light trafficconditions in order to conserve the power consumption ofsuch networks. More specifically, when the traffic load in themiddle cell of a network with three micro-cells is sufficientlylow, the corresponding BS can be switched off and its userswill be covered by increasing the transmission power of onesector antenna in each of the two neighboring cells. Twoteletraffic-based power saving schemes are proposed in ourstudy. The first scheme analyzes the expected sojourn timesof different channel occupancies and switches off the BSdeterministically when the switching thresholds are met. Thesecond scheme instead switches off the BS probabilisticallybased on a policy designed using a Finite Markov DecisionProcess (FMDP). Numerical results for the first schemedemonstrate that a reasonable amount of network powercan be saved at the cost of slightly higher transmissionpower. The results for the second scheme indicate that alower limit on the long-term network transmission powercan be obtained using the FMDP-based analysis.
展开▼
