Dynamic Traffic Management for Green Open Access Femtocell Networks

The exponential increase in high rate traffic driven by the new generation of wireless services is expected to overload cellular network capacity in the near future. Femtocell networks have recently been proposed as an efficient and cost-effective solution to enhance cellular network capacity and coverage. However, dense and unplanned deployment of new Base Stations (BSs) and their uncoordinated operation may increase the system power consumption and rise co-channel interference. Thus, efficient schemes are essential for managing femtocell activity and improving the system performance. Classical cell switch off and discontinuous transmission (DTX) algorithms aim at improving the network Energy Efficiency (EE) in lightly loaded scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-cell architecture for Open Access femtocell networks, which also enables energy saving at medium and high loads without compromising the end-user performance.