Energy-efficient femtocell networks: challenges and opportunities

As a promising technique for next-generation wireless networks, femtocells expand the coverage of cellular networks, provide high data rate for users, decrease the transmission power of user equipments, and increase the spectrum efficiency. In a few years, the number of deployed femtocell base stations (FBSs) will reach hundreds of millions. This huge deployment will bring a lot of challenges in terms of interference management, resource scheduling, and energy consumption. In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to energy-efficient communications. The huge number of deployed FBSs will aggravate energy consumption. In this article, we comprehensively survey the related work on energy efficiency issues in femtocell networks, including energy efficiency metrics, energy consumption models, deployments of femtocells, and energy-efficient schemes. Then a simple sleeping scheme, fixed time sleeping, is presented as a case study for saving the energy of FBSs. Some interesting results are also presented to show that fixed time sleeping makes a good trade-off among energy efficiency, actual waiting time, and call loss.