Power Control and Cell Discontinuous Transmission used as a means of decreasing Small-Cell Networks’ Energy Consumption

International audienceIn this article, we analyze the issues of power control and Cell Discontinuous Transmission (Cell DTx) in a small-cell network. More precisely, we evaluate the performance of a policy, thanks to which each base station minimizes its own energy consumption. We have recently proposed this policy in a mono-cell scenario and we extend the scope of our previous work in this article, as we propose to use this policy in a multi-cell network. For that purpose, we first consider a network made of two base stations, in which we can compute the minimum network's energy consumption, which enables to provide users with the requested quality of service. If we compare the proposed policy with this minimum, we can demonstrate that the proposed policy has a good performance, which, however, can be improved by reducing the maximum transmit power of the base station. Then, we apply our algorithm in the case of a dense network, in which the proposed policy outperforms other policies and provides a 6% gain in energy, where compared to a policy featuring no power control. We show that the reduction of the maximum transmit power can increase this gain up to 11% of the network's energy consumption