Joint discontinuous transmission and power control for high energy efficiency in heterogeneous small cell networks

The deployment of small cell base stations (SCBSs) overlaid on existing macro cellular networks can potentially improve the coverage and capacity of cellular wireless systems. However, a massive deployment of SCBSs also leads to an undesirable increase in energy consumption and severe intratier and inter-tier interference. In this paper, the joint design of discontinuous transmission (DTX) and power control (PC) is considered to minimize the sum energy consumption in heterogeneous small cell networks. Under the queueing delay constraints, the optimal design for maintaining the queue stability and improving the energy efficiency performance is derived via Lyapunov optimization. To facilitate the distributed implementation, an online joint DTX&PC algorithm (OJDPA) is developed using non-cooperative game theory approach. With the stability analysis, the (O(1/V, O(V))) power-delay tradeoff can be obtained by the proposed OJDPA. Simulation results corroborates the power-delay tradeoff of OJDPA and confirms that the OJDPA can achieve prominent energy efficiency performance, while still maintaining strong queueing stability.