Power Consumption Reduction by Switching Off Base Stations

Switching off base stations is a common approach to reduce the power consumption of cellular networks. This work evaluates the potential for reducing power consumption while maintaining the quality of service in a network under low utilization. For this, the Vienna fifth generation (5G) system-level simulator is extended with a base station power consumption model and a switch-off mechanism for base stations. The extended simulator is used to evaluate the throughput, power consumption, and signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) of a nightly network with few active users. Simulations show that switching off base stations can reduce the nightly network's power consumption by 40% while maintaining the desired throughput levels. To achieve further power consumption reduction, a trade-off between user throughput and power consumption has to be made.