A Game-Based Approach for Energy Saving in Cellular Base Station under Multi-operator Environments

Recently, the number of Base Stations (BSs) of 4G network has increased significantly due to the rapidly growing mobile telecommunication services. Such dense deployment of base stations demands high energy consumption with extremely low energy efficiency due to their low utilization rate during low traffic period. This paper studies a multi-operator infrastructure sharing and energy saving problem, and proposes a novel game theoretic approach to improve the overall energy efficiency without compromising the offered Quality of Service (QoS). This study belives that two operators serve in the same area, and they use non-cooperative game to decide on their base stations switching on-off and user roaming strategies. The time period for switching off the redundant base stations is studied, and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can improve the energy efficiency without degrading the offered QoS represented by blocking rate.