User Association and Small-Cell Base Station On/Off Strategies for Energy Efficiency of Ultradense Networks

The widespread application of wireless mobile services and requirements of ubiquitous access have resulted in drastic growth of the mobile traffic and huge energy consumption in ultradense networks (UDNs). Therefore, energy-efficient design is very important and is becoming an inevitable trend. To improve the energy efficiency (EE) of UDNs, we present a joint optimization method considering user association and small-cell base station (SBS) on/off strategies in UDNs. The problem is formulated as a nonconvex nonlinear programming problem and is then decomposed into two subproblems: user association and SBS on/off strategies. In the user association strategy, users associate with base stations (BSs) according to their movement speeds and utility function values, under the constraints of the signal-to-interference ratio (SINR) and load balancing. In particular, taking care of user mobility, users are associated if their speed exceeds a certain threshold. The macrocell base station (MBS) considers user mobility, which prevents frequent switching between users and SBSs. In the SBS on/off strategy, SBSs are turned off according to their loads and the amount of time required for mobile users to arrive at a given SBS to further improve network energy efficiency. By turning off SBSs, negative impacts on user associations can be reduced. The simulation results show that relative to conventional algorithms, the proposed scheme achieves energy efficiency performance enhancements.