Base Station Switching Strategy Using Normalized Residual Energy in Green Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

The introduction of smart phones and other smart gadgets, which offers ubiquitous internet access and other diverse multimedia applications, has lead to the explosive growth of mobile data. However, this also increases the energy consumptions and carbon footprint of the mobile communications industry. The recent advancement in green telecommunication networks explores energy saving through dynamic base station (BS) switching algorithms. One such strategy is to entirely turn off some under-utilized BSs during low traffic periods. The decision metric for this switching strategy is the system load, however the system load doesn’t always vary at the same rate over space. Residual energy can be used as a more reliable metric for switching and it is independent of traffic variations. Normalized residual energy based algorithm can be implemented effectively in both homogeneous and heterogeneous environment. Keywords-green communication; cellular networks; energy saving; normalized residual