Energy efficient heterogeneous network deployment with cell DTX

This paper evaluates different means of reducing power consumption of macro base stations (BS) and heterogeneous mobile network deployments (HetNet) considering the time dimension. These approaches are based on the same idea of reducing the load of heavily loaded macro cells and putting them to discontinuous transmission (DTX) mode during the time of inactivity by either (1) macro cell densification or (2) offloading traffic to small cells. Activity factor of a BS is defined as the fraction of time the BS is transmitting over a fixed time period. It is shown that by macro cell layer network densification, the average daily area power consumption can be reduced by up to 73 % with the use of cell DTX. However, reducing the activity factor by macro layer densification is not cost effective, as already demonstrated in previous studies. Alternatively, by adding small cells and enabling their DTX capability, power consumption can be reduced by up to 29 %. Adding small cells is especially effective in terms of energy savings, when users are distributed around hot spots, where additional coverage and capacity is required.