A self-organizing base station sleeping and user association strategy for dense cellular networks

Due to the rising concerns of energy consumption in wireless networks, base station (BS) sleeping strategies were introduced to save energy in low traffic scenarios. In this paper we analyse a weighted trade-off between energy consumption and user-perceived performance in dense cellular networks. We present an optimization problem representing this trade-off and derive properties of its optimal solutions. Using these properties we design a self-organizing strategy that dynamically (online) makes load-aware user association and BS operation decisions. Our strategy is self-organizing in the sense that it does not need any information or optimization beforehand, it simply relies on real-time load measurements at the BSs and user-reported SINR values. We furthermore present extensive simulation results, demonstrating the effectiveness of our self-organizing strategy and the impact of increased energy consumption on the user-perceived performance.