Energy efficient coverage planning in cellular networks with sleep mode

In this paper, we consider energy efficient coverage planning in cellular networks. To save energy, each base station (BS) can work in sleep mode when there is no user in its coverage or the users can be served by neighbor base stations. With increasing coverage overlap, there is a tradeoff between the number of BSs per unit area and the proportion of active base stations. Analytical and numerical methods are presented to evaluate coverage planning schemes with different inter-BS distance. Evaluation results show that compared with the minimum coverage overlap scheme, the optimal planning scheme can reduce the network energy consumption by more than 20%, and the performance improvement depends on the user density, network topology, and the power consumption of sleep mode.