Adaptive Traffic Load-Balancing for Green Cellular Networks

The sleeping strategy has become popular to reduce power consumption of base stations (BSs) by shutting down underutilized BSs in the management of green cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for an energy efficient use of cellular networks, based on traffic load balancing. By modeling the power consumption for BSs connected to uniformly distributed users, the relationship between the optimal number of active (or shut down) BSs and the traffic load is then derived through the power ratio, which is the ratio between dynamic and fixed power part of BS power consumption. Both analytical and simulation results demonstrate that, in order to achieve significant energy savings, less BSs should be turned on at low traffic load while more BSs turned on at high traffic load.