Power saving with CoMP transmission for densely deployed small cell networks

Small cell base stations (SBSs) are being developed as a way of expanding the coverage of cellular networks. However, the power consumption of small cell networks has become an acute problem. To mitigate this problem, we propose a new power-saving scheme based on coordinate multi-point (CoMP) transmission for densely deployed small cell networks. This scheme turns off lightly loaded SBSs and switches their users to the cooperative clusters formed by their neighbor SBSs. The cooperative clusters adopt the virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology to serve the users in the switched-off SBSs. To achieve high power-efficiency, we first model the power consumption of all the SBSs by considering the quality of service of users in the switched-off SBSs and then provide in-depth proofs and analysis according to characteristics of small cell networks. Our extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves system power-saving efficiency significantly.