Cell Wilting and Blossoming for Energy Efciency

In this paper, we consider the adoption of sleep modes for the base stations of a cellular access network, with the objective of reducing the amount of energy necessary to serve users in periods of low traffic. We discuss the main issues arising with this approach, and we focus on the design of base station sleep and wake-up transients, also known as cell wilting and blossoming. The performance of the proposed procedures is evaluated in a realistic test scenario and the results show that sleep and wake-up transients are short, of the order of thirty seconds at most.