Cooperative Virtual Cell Clustering for Green Cellular Networks

In this paper, a novel cell cooperation-based scheme is proposed as a means of energy saving in an overlapped coverage area of several cells. Different from the existing singlecell serving mode, our proposal utilizes virtual cell clustering (VCC) technique, which aggregates spare bandwidth from all adjacent cells, to reduce energy consumption while satisfying the service requirement simultaneously. For the maximum energy saving gain, a service partition procedure is then introduced with an optimization problem modeled in the scenarios under consideration. Evidences from numerical simulations further demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing mode with a significant energy saving achievement.