Energy saving game for Massive MIMO: Coping with Daily Load Variation

Massive MIMO (MM) is one of the leading technologies that can cater for very high capacity demand. However, energy consumption of MM systems need to be load adaptive in order to cope with the significant temporal load variations (TLV) over a day. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic model for studying load adaptive multi-cell massive MIMO system where each base station (BS) adapts the number of antennas to the TLV in order to maximize the downlink energy efficiency (EE). The utility function considered here is defined as the number of bits transferred per Joule of energy. In order to incorporate the TLV, the load at each BS is modeled as an M/G/m/m state dependent queue under the assumption that the network is dimensioned to serve a maximum number of users at the peak load. The EE maximization problem is formulated in a game theoretic framework where the number of antennas to be used by a BS is determined through best response iteration. This load adaptive system achieves around 24% higher EE and saves around 40% energy compared to a baseline system where the BSs always run with the fixed number of antennas that is the most energy efficient at the peak load and that can be switched off when there is no traffic.