Abstract-This paper addresses the challenge of how to reduce the energy consumption of a multi-cell network under a dynamic traffic load. The body of investigation first shows that the energy reduction upper-bound for transmission improving techniques is hardware-limited, and the bound for infrastructure reduction is capacity-limited. The paper proposes a novel cell expansion technique, where the coverage area of cells can expand and contract based on the traffic load. This is accomplished by switching off low load cellsites and compensating for the coverage loss by expanding the neighboring cells through antenna beam tilting. The multi-cell coordination is resolved by using either a centralized controller or a distributed self-organizing-network (SON) algorithm. The analysis demonstrates that the proposed distributed algorithm is able to exploit flexibility and performance uncertainty through reinforced learning and improves on the centralized solution. The combined energy saving benefit of the proposed techniques is up to 50% compared to a reference deployment and 44% compared with alternative state-of-the-art dynamic base-station techniques.
For instance, Guo and O'Farell REF conceived a cell-expansion technique for carrying dynamically fluctuating traffic loads based on the innovative concept of cell-coordination, which switches off low-load BSs and compensates for the resultant coverage loss by expanding the coverage of the neighboring cells.
Dynamic Cell Expansion with Self-Organizing Cooperation
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Computer Science