Intelligent Deactivation of Transmitters for a Greener Cellular Network

Going green to reduce energy expenditure has become an important goal for cellular operators, particularly in emerging markets. We study a nation-wide commercial GSM network in India, to find that there are several redundancies in transmitters (sectors) from a coverage and capacity perspective during many hours of the day. Therefore, depending on the traffic load, we propose to turn off a carefully selected set of transmitters, allowing their neighboring transmitters to take over added coverage and capacity responsibilities. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the architecture and usage of a commercial network from such a greening perspective. Based on this analysis, we propose algorithms to efficiently detect the maximal number of redundant transmitters without degrading the performance of the network. For dense urban areas, our approach reduces the energy consumption of a network of base stations by over 50%, and yields close to 30% energy savings over an entire mid-sized city.