Energy-efficient indoor hybrid deployment strategy for 5G mobile small-cell base stations using JAFR Algorithm

Abstract

In the context of 5th-generation (5G) mobile communication technology, deploying indoor small-cell base stations (SBS) to serve visitors has become common. However, indoor SBS is constrained by factors such as service capacity, signal interference, and structural layout. Merchants within large buildings frequently host diverse activities to attract visitors, significantly increasing indoor traffic and crowd-gathering phenomenon. Consequently, SBS faces challenges of excessive energy consumption, compromised communication quality, and an inability to provide service to all visitors. Merchants aim to deploy SBS that can effectively curtail energy consumption costs while fulfilling visitor needs. However, due to the intermittent nature of high footfall situations, employing additional fixed SBS is not economically viable. Therefore, we address the challenge of maintaining service quality and mitigating energy consumption of SBS during footfall fluctuations by proposing an SBS model with a dynamic sleep mechanism. We simulate the internal structure of a three-dimensional (3D) building and the footfall over time. Within this model, we leverage the flexibility of mobile small-cell base stations (MSBS) to seamlessly traverse service regions. We compute the transmission power and location of SBS and MSBS based on energy efficiency (EE), combining their strengths to tackle the challenge. This approach maintains SBS communication quality while curbing energy consumption. We attain the optimal hybrid deployment strategy by enhancing the adaptive differential evolution with optional external archive (JADE) algorithm and incorporating the final fitness formula, the adaptive ranking mutation operator strategy, and the disorder replacement strategy (DRS) in it to form the proposed joint adaptive fusion with ranking (JAFR) algorithm. Our comparative simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of JAFR in addressing the challenges against conventional methods, recent differential evolution algorithms, and mobile base station (MBS) deployment approaches posed by this model. The results indicate that the JAFR algorithm yields superior SBS deployment strategies in most cases.