A Survey of Energy Efficiency Optimization in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

The research on optimization of cellular network’s energy efficiency (EE) towards environmental and economic sustainability has attracted increasing attention recently. In this survey, we discuss the opportunities, trends and challenges of this challenging topic. Two major contributions are presented namely 1) survey of proposed energy efficiency metrics; 2) survey of proposed energy efficient solutions. We provide a broad overview of the state of-the-art energy efficient methods covering base station (BS) hardware design, network planning and deployment, and network management and operation stages. In order to further understand how EE is assessed and improved through the heterogeneous network (HetNet), BS’s energy-awareness and several typical HetNet deployment scenarios such as macrocell-microcell and macrocell-picocell are presented. The analysis of different HetNet deployment scenarios gives insights towards a successful deployment of energy efficient cellular networks.