Virtual Cell Zooming and Sleep Mode for 3GPP-LTE Green Cellular Networks

This paper presents a study on green cellular networks for 3GPP-LTE networks, comparing the performance of the sleep mode and cell zooming algorithms not only in terms of their energy efficiency, but also verifying whether energy savings do not cause coverage or throughput losses in the network. In order to perform this study, we have developed a radio network simulator, which accounts for the traffic variation of a cellular network over the day and over different regions of the grid. Because of performance and implementation limitations of the cell zooming algorithm found in the literature, we propose a modification, called virtual cell zooming.