  The design of energy-efficient mechanisms is one of the key challenges in
emerging wireless small cell networks. In this paper, a novel approach for
opportunistically switching ON/OFF base stations to improve the energy
efficiency in wireless small cell networks is proposed. The proposed approach
enables the small cell base stations to optimize their downlink performance
while balancing the load among each another, while satisfying their users'
quality-of-service requirements. The problem is formulated as a noncooperative
game among the base stations that seek to minimize a cost function which
captures the tradeoff between energy expenditure and load. To solve this game,
a distributed learning algorithm is proposed using which the base stations
autonomously choose their optimal transmission strategies. Simulation results
show that the proposed approach yields significant performance gains in terms
of reduced energy expenditures up to 23% and reduced load up to 40% compared to
conventional approaches.
