Network cooperation for energy saving in green radio communications

Financial and environmental considerations have motivated a trend in wireless communication network design and operation to minimize the amount of energy consumption. This trend is referred to as green radio communications. In this article, network cooperation is investigated as a means of energy saving. Networks with overlapped coverage can cooperate to reduce their energy consumption by alternately switching on and off their resources according to the traffic load conditions. We present an optimal resource on-off switching framework that adapts to the fluctuations in the traffic load and maximizes the amount of energy saving under service quality constraints in a cooperative networking environment. For the system model under consideration, unlike the existing solutions in the literature, the proposed technique can achieve energy saving while avoiding an increase in transmission power. Numerical results demonstrate the validity of the proposed technique.