Self-organized virtual small networking for energy saving and load balancing in cellular networks

In this paper, a power efficient self-organized virtual small networking protocol is proposed to save network-wide power consumption in cellular networks. The meta-heuristic firefly algorithm is proposed to arrange the base stations (BSs) into several groups based on a well-defined brightness, which is a traffic load related factor. By jointly considering the load balance in each BS group, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated under two scenarios with different functions of brightness. In addition, the BS-off matching scheme and BS on/off weight are developed to improve the BSs power efficiency of. The simulation results show that our proposals can effectively save more power compared to the existing unified strategy.