  With the recent explosion in mobile data, the energy consumption and carbon
footprint of the mobile communications industry is rapidly increasing. It is
critical to develop more energy-efficient systems in order to reduce the
potential harmful effects to the environment. One potential strategy is to
switch off some of the under-utilized base stations during off-peak hours. In
this paper, we propose a binary Social Spider Algorithm to give guidelines for
selecting base stations to switch off. In our implementation, we use a penalty
function to formulate the problem and manage to bypass the large number of
constraints in the original optimization problem. We adopt several randomly
generated cellular networks for simulation and the results indicate that our
algorithm can generate superior performance.
