Energy-Efficient Base-Station Cooperative Operation with Guaranteed QoS

With the explosive deployment of the information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures, the rising cost of energy and increased environmental awareness has sparked a keen interest in the development and deployment of energy-efficient communication technologies. As a major player in the ICT sector, the energy efficiency of the mobile cellular networks can be significantly improved by switching off some base stations during off-peak periods. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient BS switching strategy, and use cooperative communication techniques among the base stations to effectively extend network coverage. We incorporate both the path-loss and fading effects in our system model, and derive closed-form expressions for two important quality of service metrics, the call-blocking probability and the channel outage probability. The proposed scheme guarantees the quality of service of the user equipments by identifying the user equipments situated at the worst-case locations. The energy-saving performance is evaluated and compared with the conventional uni-pattern operation. Both analytical and numerical results show that the proposed energy-efficient switching strategy, facilitated by BS cooperation, can provide significant energy-saving potential for the cellular networks with guaranteed quality of service.