A self-organizing cooperative heterogeneous cellular access network for energy conservation

In this paper, we propose a cooperative and self-organizing energy efficient access network framework for heterogeneous cellular systems. Intranetwork and internetwork cooperation are jointly employed for optimizing the energy savings. In intranetwork cooperation, based on the instantaneous traffic, base transceiver stations (BTSs) in a network cooperatively and intelligently swap traffic, switch operating modes, and thus conserve energy. While, using internetwork cooperation, multiple networks are engaged cooperatively to share their BTSs for further optimizing energy savings. Comprehensive simulations using realistic traffic patterns are carried out for different schemes and network scenarios. Results identify that the proposed joint cooperation can achieve significant energy savings, which is much higher than if the intranetwork and the internetwork cooperation are applied separately. Moreover, the proposed framework and the algorithms are sufficiently self-organizing, i.e., they are autonomous in decision making and implementation process.