Energy efficient small cell activation mechanism for heterogeneous networks

In this paper, we present a novel small cell activation mechanism for heterogeneous networks, which considers the energy saving gains obtained based on the amount of traffic load off-loaded from the macro cell to small cells, while avoiding UE QoS degradation. The main idea is to off-load traffic to small cells in energy saving mode, only when there is significant energy saving gains achievable from the process, thereby reducing the total energy consumption of the network. The mechanism is evaluated using LTE-Advanced heterogeneous network system setting, in terms of energy saving gains as well as user throughput. The results show that with the considered scheme, significant power savings can be achieved with acceptable tradeoffs in off-loading performance, compared to an optimized proximity-based small cell activation scheme.