In these considerations, mobile traffic characteristics are of major importance: In [5) the spatial and temporal user/traffic distribution is investigated. It shows a high level of dependency on the time of day. In night hours, the cells are highly underutilized in terms of traffic and number of active users while the energy-consumption remains approximately constant all over the day in current cellular mobile networks [6],[7]. Therefore, it has been proposed to shut down RAN elements (or to put them into sleep mode) in low traffic hours to reduce the energy consumption and to improve the alignment between power consumption of the RAN and the carried traffic load.
E. g. in [8] this idea is applied to s witch on/off the power amplifiers.