Energy-efficient base station management in heterogeneous networking environments

Reduction of energy consumption is becoming a crucial aspect of wireless communications, due to the need of lowering CO2 emissions and enhancing mobile network operators OPEX. In this work we consider a heterogeneous mobile network topology with coexisting macrocellular and microcellular Base Stations (BSs). By employing two energy optimization heuristics we determine operational profiles for the network BSs under various traffic loads and examine their impact on handoff signaling rate and achievable throughput. The obtained simulation results exhibit that the proposed BS operational profiles yield quite satisfactory energy saving gains compared to Full Operational Topology (FOT) networks in all examined scenarios, without degradation of the network´s handoff signaling rate and achievable throughput of the mobile subscribers.