A scalable multimode base station switching model for green cellular networks

Recently, base station (BS) sleeping has emerged as a viable conservation strategy for energy efficient communication networks. Switching-off particular BS during low-traffic periods requires the load to be sufficiently low so user performance is not compromised. There remain however, network energy saving opportunities during medium-to-high traffic periods if BSs operate in scalable fashion, which involves deploying multiple BSs with different power modes, i.e., macro/microcells, which are co-located in each cell. In this paper, a new scalable multimode BS switching (MMBS) cellular model is presented where depending on the traffic load, each BS operates in multimode: active, low-power and sleep, so the model dimensions network capacity by dynamically switching modes to minimise energy consumption. Results corroborate that the MMBS model reduces energy consumption by more than 50% during low-traffic and up to 9% during high-traffic conditions, thereby significantly improving the energy efficiency compared with the always-on and existing BS sleeping approaches.