Energy-efficient cell selection and resource allocation in LTE-A heterogeneous networks

In 3GPP Release-12 specification, the adoption of small cells in long term evolution (LTE) networks is considered as a promising solution to meet the growing traffic demand for mobile data usage. However, energy consumption becomes a crucial challenge for network operators to deploy more small cells in heterogeneous networks in order to fulfill the requirement for achieving high data rates. In this paper, an advanced signaling mechanism has been proposed to practically acquire global channel state information (CSI) between network components. Based on the signaling scheme, an energy-efficient cell selection and resource allocation (ECR) algorithm is proposed to increase system energy efficiency by handovering UEs from light-loaded base station to nearby cells. Some active cells can therefore be switched off to reduce total energy consumption. Simulation results show that better energy efficiency can be achieved by adopting the proposed signaling and ECR schemes.