A Data-Driven Base Station Sleeping Strategy Based on Traffic Prediction

Due to the rapidly increasing number of base stations (BSs) in the operational cellular networks, their energy consumption is escalating. In this paper, we propose an intelligent data-driven BS sleeping mechanism relying on a wireless traffic prediction model that measures the BSs’ capacity in different regions. Firstly, a spatio-temporal cellular traffic prediction model is proposed, where a multi-graph convolutional network (MGCN) is developed to capture the associated spatial features. Furthermore, a multi-channel long short-term memory (LSTM) solution involving hourly, daily, and weekly periodic data is used to capture the relevant temporal features. Secondly, the capacities of macro-cell BSs (MBSs) and small-cell BSs (SBSs) having different environment characteristics are modeled, where both clustering and transfer learning algorithms are adopted for quantifying the traffic supported by the MBSs and SBSs. Finally, an optimal BS sleeping strategy is proposed for minimizing the network’s power consumption. Experimental results show that the proposed MGCN-LSTM model outperforms the existing models in terms of its cellular traffic prediction accuracy, and the proposed BS sleeping strategy using an approximated non-linear model of the associated capacity function achieves near-maximal energy-saving at a modest complexity.