Low consumption home femto base stations

The expected massive adoption of home femto base stations will increase the overall power consumption, requiring eco-designed sleep modes. Whenever there are no user under the coverage of a home femto base station (at night for example), keeping it on can be seen as a waste of power, excessive interferences and lack of security. This paper proposes a method to switch-off the femto base station radio emission and wake it up when necessary. Our approach uses a second low-power channel that carries out-of-band control information to maintain connectivity. The paper will provide the software and hardware architecture and performance results of a Wi-Fi demonstrator.