TAPS: Traffic-Aware Power Saving Scheme for Clustered Small Cell Base Stations in LTE-A

To meet the soaring demand of high data rate from today´s applications of mobile Internet, small cells would be widely deployed to achieve higher data rate and better spectral efficiency in 4G and B4G/5G cellular networks. However, when the network traffic load is low, a large number of small-cell base stations could incur a tremendous energy waste. To overcome this pitfall, in this paper, we propose a traffic-aware power saving scheme (TAPS) by which a small-cell base station can adequately switch its operation mode - namely, normal, sniff and low-duty modes - according to its traffic load to reduce its power consumption. Simulation results show that TAPS can save a large amount of energy but only slightly hamper system performance compared with the case without power-saving scheme.