Relax, but Do Not Sleep: A new perspective on Green Wireless Networking

Saving power on base stations (BS) becomes a critical issue in wireless cellular networks. Many existing work has proposed to schedule BS into sleep to save energy. However, in reality, it is very difficult to shut down and reboot BSs frequently due to numerous technical issues and performance requirements. In this work, we propose a much more practical solution and offer a new perspective on implementing Green Wireless Networking by embracing the hot-trended small cell network idea. Instead of putting BSs into sleep, we tactically reduce the coverage (and the power usage) of each BS, and strategically place microcells (relay stations) to offload the traffic transmitted to/from BSs in order to save total power consumption. We propose approximation algorithms for various network design scenarios, with different wireless network setups and different power saving optimization objectives. Extensive numerical results are presented to confirm our theoretical analysis.