Energy-Efficient Coordinated Sleep of LTE Cells

Estimates indicate that about 80% of the power consumption of cellular networks must be supplied by operators. It is thus becoming of paramount importance to improve the energy efficiency of cellular networks at the operator side for an economic and environmentally-sustainable traffic growth. The introduction of discontinuous transmission - or sleep mode - at the base stations can enable a reduction of power consumption. To further enhance the reduction, this paper proposes to coordinate the sleep scheduling among neighboring cells. The sleep schedule coordination allows the inter-cell interference reduction, during the sleep periods.