Traffic aware offloading for BS sleeping in heterogeneous networks

To make heterogeneous networks more energy-efficient, a new cellular framework named hyper-cellular networks has been proposed, in which the coverage of control signals is decoupled from the coverage of data signals so that the data coverage can be more elastic in accordance with the traffic dynamics. By offloading the traffic to neighboring or upper-layer cells, more cells can be turned off and therefore more energy can be saved. The fundamental question then arises: how much energy can be saved by traffic offloading for given QoS requirement? In this paper, we characterize this problem in theoretical as well as numerical manner.