A Model to Analyze the Energy Savings of Base Station Sleep Mode in LTE HetNets

In this paper we study the base station (BS) sleep mode as an approach to decrease the energy consumption of LTE HetNets. We present an energy model which takes into account that (i) macro, micro and pico BSs have different power consumption profiles, (ii) macro BS power consumption is varying with the load, and (iii) communication through a macro, micro or pico cell has different radio resource utilization. Furthermore, we introduce two sleep algorithms, namely single sleep and multiple sleep, to determine the time instant to enable micro or pico BSs sleep mode. Finally, we analyze the two proposed algorithms in different HetNet topologies and with different traffic requirements to evaluate the network energy consumption and the savings that the sleep mode can achieve.