Energy efficient macrocell strategy: Opportunistic beamforming with femtocells deployment based on hourly user location distribution

In the conventional cellular macrocell implementation strategy, the main base station transmits the radio signals in the omnidirectional manner in order to provide a wide range of cellular transmission to the users. In reality, however, the users move from one place to another depending on their activities, hence, sometimes this creates areas where no user exists inside the macrocell. Nevertheless, the base station continues to transmit the radio signals to all the coverage areas due to its involuntary manner, thus causing waste of energy. In our previous work, an energy efficient LTE macrocell base station scheme based on hourly user location distribution, which utilized opportunistic beamforming, was proposed in order to provide the cellular transmission only to the area where the user density is high. The drawback of this scheme was that there were many users who cannot receive the cellular transmission because of the limitation of the beamforming shape. In this paper, to overcome this difficulty, a new energy efficient macrocell strategy will be proposed. Here, additional low power consumption femtocell access points are deployed inside the macrocell to support the energy efficient opportunistic beamforming based on the hourly user location distribution. Concretely, the femtocell access points are woken up only when the active calling users exist inside its range. The proposed new strategy will be evaluated in terms of the hourly successful calling user ratio, the total power consumption and the hourly average downlink throughput compared with the previously proposed beamforming transmission strategy and the conventional omnidirectional transmission. The results will show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in providing an energy efficient cellular macrocell system with high quality cellular services.