Cell Switch-Off Algorithms for Spatially Irregular Base Station Deployments

In cell switch-off (CSO) research, the base station (BS) deployment is usually assumed to follow a regular grid. Some recent works considered instead a fully random (Poisson point process) BS deployment. Given that the best signal-to-interference ratio distribution can be achieved when BSs are located on a hexagonal layout, we study applying CSO to irregular network layouts with the objective of making the active BS locations as regular as possible, regardless of the irregularity of the original network layout. In this letter, we test the suitability of several CSO algorithms for this new objective; we also introduce a novel algorithm which performs very well when the number of BSs to switch off is high.