A promising technique for minimizing the transmission power of cellular networks seems to be a dramatic densification of micro-cells coverage. On the other hand, increasing the number of micro-cells multiplies the energy consumed by the cells whatever their state, idle, transmitting or receiving. For a sustainable deployment of such micro-cell infrastructures and for a significative decrease of the overall energy consumption, an operator needs to be able to switch off cells when there are not absolutely needed. The densification of the cells induces the need for an autonomic control of the on/off state of cells. This has motivated a preliminary investigation on exploiting within the micro-cellular settings the manyfold results of duty cycles for Wireless Sensor Networks where switching nodes on and off is done in a distributed or localized manner while coverage and connectivity properties are maintained.