Semidynamic Green Resource Management in Downlink Heterogeneous Networks by Group Sparse Power Control

This paper addresses an energy-saving problem for the downlink of a cloud-assisted heterogeneous network (HetNet) using a time-division duplex (TDD) model, which aims to minimize the base stations (BSs) sum power consumption while meeting the rate requirement of each user equipment (UE). The basic idea of this work is to make use of the scalability of system configurations such that green resource management can be employed by flexibly switching off some unnecessary hardware components, especially for off-peak traffic scenarios. This motivates us to utilize a flexible BS power consumption formulation to jointly model its signal processing and circuit power, transmit power, and backhaul transmission power. Instead of using the integer variables [1,0] to control the “on/off” two status of a BS in most previous work, we employ the group sparsity of a transmit power vector to denote the activity of each frequency carrier (FC) such that the signal processing and circuit power can be scaled with the effective bandwidth, thereby leading to multiple sleep modes for a BS in multi-FC systems. Based on this BS power model and the group sparsity concept, a simplified resource allocation scheme for joint BS-UE association, FC assignment, downlink power allocation, and BS sleep modes determination is presented, which is based on the average channel statistics computed over the coherence time of the large scale fading (LSF). This semidynamic green resource management mechanism can be formulated as a NP-hard optimization problem. In order to make it tractable, the successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithm is applied to efficiently find a stationary solution using a cloud-based centralized optimization. Simulation results also verify the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism under the developed BS power consumption model.