Revenue Maximization through Cell Switching and Spectrum Leasing in 5G HetNets

Abstract

One of the ways of achieving improved capacity in mobile cellular networks is via network densification. Even though densification increases the capacity of the network, it also leads to increased energy consumption which can be curbed by dynamically switching off some base stations (BSs) during periods of low traffic. However, dynamic cell switching has the challenge of spectrum under-utilization as the spectrum originally occupied by the BSs that are turned off remains dormant. This dormant spectrum can be leased by the primary network (PN) operators, who hold the license, to the secondary network (SN) operators who cannot afford to purchase the spectrum license. Thus enabling the PN to gain additional revenue from spectrum leasing as well as from electricity cost savings due to reduced energy consumption. Therefore, in this work, we propose a cell switching and spectrum leasing framework based on simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to maximize the revenue of the PN while respecting the quality-of-service constraints. The performance evaluation reveals that the proposed method is very close to optimal exhaustive search method with a significant reduction in the computation complexity.