Clustered Cell-Free Networking With BS Sleeping for Downlink Sum Rate Maximization

Clustered cell-free networking has appeared as a promising technique to overcome the cell-edge problem in cellular networks. This is achieved by dynamically decomposing the whole network into a number of non-overlapping weakly-interfered subnetworks and conducting joint processing among the base-stations (BSs) in the same subnetwork. For optimizing clustered cell-free networking, i.e., network decomposition, existing works usually assumed that all the BSs are involved in signal transmission/reception. However, switching a BS far away from user equipments (UEs) into sleep mode could improve the data rate due to the reduced inter-UE interference. In this paper, we aim to maximize the downlink sum rate of the network by optimizing clustered cell-free networking while considering dynamic BS sleeping. By decomposing the problem into a BS assignment subproblem and a UE assignment subproblem, an alternating optimization based clustered cell-free networking (AO-C²F-Net) algorithm is proposed. Simulation results corroborate that enabling BS sleeping improves the sum rate performance. In addition, the proposed AO-C²F-Net algorithm outperforms existing benchmarks in terms of optimizing both clustered cell-free networking and BS sleeping. © 2025 IEEE.