SMDP-based sleep policy for base stations in heterogeneous cellular networks

A dense heterogeneous cellular network can effectively increase the system capacity and enhance the network coverage. It is a key technology for the new generation of the mobile communication system. The dense deployment of small base stations not only improves the quality of network service, but also brings about a significant increase in network energy consumption. This paper mainly studies the energy efficiency optimization of the Macro-Femto heterogeneous cellular network. Considering the dynamic random changes of the access users in the network, the sleep process of the Femto Base Stations (FBSs) is modeled as a Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) model in order to save the network energy consumption. And further, this paper gives the dynamic sleep algorithm of the FBS based on the value iteration. The simulation results show that the proposed SMDP-based adaptive sleep strategy of the FBS can effectively reduce the network energy consumption.