Energy management in LTE femtocells

This chapter discusses various energy saving (ES) techniques for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems and critically analyses their usability through a comprehensive comparative study. It focuses on energy management in LTE networks, and presents a brief overview of the LTE architecture. Based on LTE specifications, 6 out of 10 subframes (SFs) can be configured as Multicast and Broadcast Single Frequency Network (MBSFN). The use of femto base stations (FBS) has proven to be promising technology to cover those areas where macro base stations (MBS) are limited. The chapter presents a broad classification of ES schemes, and detailed insights into individual schemes. ES approaches proposed in the literature can be broadly classified in categories of energy efficient resource allocation, load balancing, carrier aggregation and bandwidth expansion. The chapter finally presents open research areas for ES in LTE networks.