Energy and Spectral Efficiency Gains from Multi-User MIMO-Based Small Cell Reassignments

In this work we investigate the reassignment of User Equipments (UEs) between adjacent small cells to concurrently enable spatial multiplexing gains through Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) and reductions in energy consumption though switching emptied small cells to a sleep state. We consider a case where UEs can be reassigned between adjacent small cells provided that the targeted neighbouring cell contains a UE with which the reassigned UE can perform MU-MIMO without experiencing excessive multi-user interference, and whilst achieving a minimum expected gain in spectral efficiency over the previous original cell transmissions as a result. We formulate the selection decision of which UEs to reassign as a set covering problem with the objective of maximising the number of small cell base stations to switch to a sleep state. Our results show that, for both indoor and outdoor LTE small cell scenarios, the proposed MU-MIMO-based reassignments achieve significant reductions in the required number of active small cell base stations, whilst simultaneously achieving increases in spectral efficiency.