Energy efficient femtocell power management

Abstract

Energy efficiency has become a critical metric in the current wireless communication and network because we spend a number of energy for operating networks. In particular, the base station is the most energy consuming part of a mobile network. Therefore, there are many approaches to solve this problem. Among them, the sleep mode of macrocell base station is one of high impact techniques. The sleep mode of macrocell base station can be used according to difference between day time and night time of radio resources. It brings the power saving about 30% and 55% for 3G and 2G system, respectively. The sleep mode of femtocell base station, as distinct from the sleep mode of macrocell base station, can be used for any time because the number of femtocell user is usually small as 1~5 users. In this paper, we propose energy efficient femtocell power management scheme for enterprise environment. In order to achieve power saving, we use the sleep mode and early handover of femtocell and propose two stages femtocell power management scheme based on self-configured power setting and self-optimized power setting. Under the given simulation configuration, we show the proposed scheme can achieve about 35%, 20% and 6% power saving when each femtocell has 1 user, 2 users and 3 users, respectively.