Energy-Efficient Joint Base Station Switching and Power Allocation for Smart Grid Based Hybrid-Powered CoMP-Enabled HetNet

With the rapid proliferation of wireless traffic and the surge of various data-intensive applications, the energy consumption of wireless networks has tremendously increased in the last decade, which not only leads to more CO2 emission, but also results in higher operating expenditure. Consequently, energy efficiency (EE) has been regarded as an essential design criterion for future wireless networks. This paper investigates the problem of EE maximisation for a cooperative heterogeneous network (HetNet) powered by hybrid energy sources via joint base station (BS) switching (BS-Sw) and power allocation using combinatorial optimisation. The cooperation among the BSs is achieved through a coordinated multi-point (CoMP) technique. Next, to overcome the complexity of combinatorial optimisation, Lagrange dual decomposition is applied to solve the power allocation problem and a sub-optimal distance-based BS-Sw scheme is proposed. The main advantage of the distance-based BS-Sw is that the algorithm is tuning-free as it exploits two dynamic thresholds, which can automatically adapt to various user distributions and network deployment scenarios. The optimal binomial and random BS-Sw schemes are also studied to serve as benchmarks. Further, to solve the non-fractional programming component of the EE maximisation problem, a low-complexity and fast converging Dinkelbach’s method is proposed. Extensive simulations under various scenarios reveal that in terms of EE, the proposed joint distance-based BS-Sw and power allocation technique applied to the cooperative and harvesting BSs performs around 15–20% better than the non-cooperative and non-harvesting BSs and can achieve near-optimal performance compared to the optimal binomial method.

Transfer restless multi-armed bandit policy for energy-efficient heterogeneous cellular network

This paper proposes a learning policy to improve the energy efficiency (EE) of heterogeneous cellular networks. The combination of active and inactive base stations (BS) that allows for maximizing EE is identified as a combinatorial learning problem and requires high computational complexity as well as a large signaling overhead. This paper aims at presenting a learning policy that dynamically switches a BS to ON or OFF status in order to follow the traffic load variation during the day. The network traffic load is represented as a Markov decision process, and we propose a modified upper confidence bound algorithm based on restless Markov multi-armed bandit framework for the BS switching operation. Moreover, to cope with initial reward loss and to speed up the convergence of the learning algorithm, the transfer learning concept is adapted to our algorithm in order to benefit from the transferred knowledge observed in historical periods from the same region. Based on our previous work, a convergence theorem is provided for the proposed policy. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms follow the traffic load variation during the day and contribute to a performance jump-start in EE improvement under various practical traffic load profiles. It also demonstrates that proposed schemes can significantly reduce the total energy consumption of cellular network, e.g., up to 70% potential energy savings based on a real traffic profile.

Improving Energy Efficiency of Cooperative Femtocell Networks via Base Station Switching Off

Recently, energy efficiency (EE) of cellular networks has become an important performance metric, and several techniques have been proposed to increase the EE. Among them, turning off base stations (BSs) when not needed is considered as one of the most powerful techniques due to its simple operation and effectiveness. Herein, we propose a novel BS switching-off technique for cooperative femtocell networks where multiple femtocell BSs (FBSs) simultaneously send packets to the same mobile station (MS). Unlike conventional schemes, cooperative operation of FBSs, also known as coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission, is considered to determine which BSs are turned off in the proposed technique. We first formulate the optimization problem to find the optimal set of FBSs to be turned off. Then, we propose a suboptimal scheme operating in a distributed manner in order to reduce the computational complexity of the optimal scheme. The suboptimal scheme is based on throughput ratio (TR) which specifies the importance of a particular FBS for the cooperative transmission. Through simulations, we show that the energy consumption can be greatly reduced with the proposed technique, compared with conventional schemes. Moreover, we show that the suboptimal scheme also achieves the near-optimal performance even without the excessive computations.