Energy management in LTE networks

Kapil Kanwal
,
Ghazanfar Ali Safdar
,
Masood Ur-Rehman
,
Xiaodong Yang

School of Computing Engineering and Creative Industries
,
Xidian University

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Open access

Abstract

Wireless cellular networks have seen dramatic growth in number of mobile users. As a result, data requirements, and hence the base-station power consumption has increased signicantly. It in turn adds to the operational expenditures and also causes global warming. The base station power consumption in long-term evolution (LTE) has, therefore, become a major challenge for vendors to stay green and protable in competitive cellular industry. It necessitates novel methods to devise energy efcient communication in LTE. Importance of the topic has attracted huge research interestsworldwide. Energy saving (ES) approaches proposed in the literature can be broadly classied in categories of energy efcient resource allocation, load balancing, carrier aggregation, and bandwidth expansion. Each of these methods has its own pros and cons leading to a tradeoff between ES and other performance metrics resulting into open research questions. This paper discusses various ES techniques for the LTE systems and critically analyses their usability through a comprehensive comparative study.