Energy savings in heterogeneous networks with clustered small cell deployments

Ultra dense small cell deployments will play a critical role in addressing future capacity requirements in dense urban outdoor and indoor environments such as train stations and shopping malls. Effective interference and energy management schemes will be needed to make such deployments technically and economically viable. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefits of a database-aided energy savings scheme for clustered small cell deployments. System-level simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can yield energy savings of up to 30% even when the network is heavily utilized, and offer throughput gains of up to 25% in case few users are present in the network, with respect to a conventional small cell deployment without the energy savings feature.