HyCell: Enabling GREEN base station operations in software-defined radio access networks

The radio access networks (RANs) need to support massive and diverse data traffic with limited spectrum and energy. To cope with this challenge, software-defined radio access network (SDRAN) architectures have been proposed to renovate the RANs. However, current researches lack the design and evaluation of network protocols. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting the protocol design and evaluation of hyper-cellular networks (HyCell), an SDRAN framework making base station (BS) operations globally resource-optimized and energy-efficient (GREEN). Specifically, we first propose a separation scheme to realize the decoupled air interface in HyCell. Then we design a BS dispatching protocol which determines and assigns the optimal BS for serving mobile users, and a BS sleeping protocol to improve the network energy efficiency. Finally, we evaluate the proposed design in our HyCell testbed. Our evaluation validates the feasibility of the proposed separation scheme, demonstrates the effectiveness of BS dispatching, and shows great potential in energy saving through BS sleeping control.