A Connection-Driven Mechanism for Energy Saving of Small-Cell Networks

The small cell technology is proposed to provide wireless transmission services in the indoor environment and offload the traffic from a macro cell. Because of the small coverage of a small cell, there are usually a large number of small cells deployed in the mobile network, and it is likely that there are no User Equipments (UEs) in a small cell. A small cell may be idle most of the time and waste energy. In this paper, we propose a Connection-Driven (CD) mechanism for energy saving of small cells, where a small cell in the sleep mode is woken up when there are UEs (that have ongoing dedicated bearers) within its service area. We propose an analytical model and simulation experiments to investigate the performance of the CD mechanism.