Low-Complexity Energy Efficient Base Station Cooperation Mechanism in LTE Networks

Currently Energy-Saving (ES) methods in cellular networks could be improved, as compensation method for irregular Base Station (BS) deployment is not effective, most regional ES algorithm is complex, and performance decline caused by ES action is not evaluated well. To resolve above issues, a low-complexity energy efficient BS cooperation mechanism for Long Time Evolution (LTE) networks is proposed. The mechanism firstly models the ES optimization problem with coverage, resource, power and Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. To resolve the problem with low complexity, it is decomposed into two sub-problems: BS Mode Determination (BMD) problem and User Association Optimization (UAO) problem. To resolve BMD, regional dynamic multi-stage algorithms with BS cooperation pair taking account of load and geographic topology is analyzed. And then a distributed heuristic algorithm guaranteeing user QoS is adopted to resolve UAO. The mechanism is simulated under four LTE scenarios. Comparing to other algorithms, results show that the mechanism can obtain better energy efficiency with acceptable coverage, throughput, and QoS performance.