# Base Station ON-OFF Switching in 5G Wireless Networks: Approaches and Challenges

## TL;DR

This paper reviews the challenges and recent advances in base station ON-OFF switching strategies in 5G networks, aiming to reduce energy consumption while maintaining quality of service amidst complex heterogeneous architectures.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of technical challenges, recent approaches, and open research problems related to BS ON-OFF switching in 5G systems.

## Key findings

- Energy savings through BS ON-OFF strategies in 5G
- Challenges due to heterogeneity and new physical layer techniques
- Identification of open research problems

## Abstract

To achieve the expected 1000x data rates under the exponential growth of traffic demand, a large number of base stations (BS) or access points (AP) will be deployed in the fifth generation (5G) wireless systems, to support high data rate services and to provide seamless coverage. Although such BSs are expected to be small-scale with lower power, the aggregated energy consumption of all BSs would be remarkable, resulting in increased environmental and economic concerns. In existing cellular networks, turning off the under-utilized BSs is an efficient approach to conserve energy while preserving the quality of service (QoS) of mobile users. However, in 5G systems with new physical layer techniques and the highly heterogeneous network architecture, new challenges arise in the design of BS ON-OFF switching strategies. In this article, we begin with a discussion on the inherent technical challenges of BS ON-OFF switching. We then provide a comprehensive review of recent advances on switching mechanisms in different application scenarios. Finally, we present open research problems and conclude the paper.