TAPS: Traffic-Aware Power Saving Scheme for Clustered Small Cell Base Stations in LTE-A

Abstract

To meet the soaring demand of high data rate from today\'s applications of mobile Internet, small cells would be widely deployed to achieve higher data rate and better spectral efficiency in 4G and B4G/5G cellular networks. However, when the network traffic load is low, a large number of small-cell base stations could incur a tremendous energy waste. To overcome this pitfall, in this paper, we propose a traffic-aware power saving scheme (TAPS) by which a small-cell base station can adequately switch its operation mode -- namely, normal, sniff and low-duty modes -- according to its traffic load to reduce its power consumption. Simulation results show that TAPS can save a large amount of energy but only slightly hamper system performance compared with the case without power-saving scheme.