Small Cell and Cell Zooming Approach for Cost Effective Green Cellular Communication

Abstract

The meteoric growth in wireless communication applications and hence the corresponding growth in the cellular network infrastructure to be provisioned has resulted in a growing concern on the energy consumption of the network, the carbon footprint and the electromagnetic pollution. Cell size in cellular networks is in general fixed based on the estimated traffic load. However if the cell size can be adjusted according to traffic, it can save a lot of energy and cost. Cell Zooming is a new concept which adaptively adjusts the cell size according to traffic conditions. Implementing cell zooming in cellular networks needs to introduce some new components and functionalities to the current network architecture. Another technique is to divide the existing cells into a number of small cells covering a few metres each having a low-power, low-cost base station (BS). Umbrella macrocells would be needed to ensure area coverage while most of the data traffic is carried by a large number of small cells. When traffic is very low in one cell, it can even be switched off for some time to save power. When traffic is too low all small cell BSs can be switched off keeping the main BS on, which sends beacon messages to sense the traffic load. This project is aimed at combining these two techniques to simulate a green cellular architecture and to determine the electromagnetic pollution index (EPI) and total energy consumed by the network in different traffic situations.