Power saving by sleep modes in base station transceivers for LTE

Abstract

Reducing the power consumed in mobile base stations is an important way to support the effort for energy reduction in communication systems. Mobile base stations are designed for peak load situations, which only occur rarely relative to the overall daily traffic profile. This means, that daily operation of mobile communication networks especially in LTE systems shows a significant amount of time periods without data transmission, leading to reduced average energy efficiency. Sleep modes in base station transceivers, based on the deactivation of components and especially of the power amplifier in time slots of no signal transmission, show a significant potential to reduce the average energy consumption in base stations. This is demonstrated by experimental evaluations, done for different traffic load conditions, on hardware prototypes, dedicated for macro-cell base station. Index Terms -Mobile base stations, power saving, component sleep modes, power amplifiers.

An Overview of Cell Zooming Algorithms and Power Saving Capabilities in Wireless Networks

“…In accordance with traffic condition, the power amplifier was put into switch-off or idle mode to save the power consumption. The same approach was done by Ferling et al [40].…”

“…It should be remembered that power saving capabilities are not comparable to each other because algorithms are different in approaching perspective, predefined constraints and reference power consumption. For example, in some works [40,41,47], energy saving is expressed by correlating maximum static transmitted power without cell zooming to variable transmitted power with cell zooming while total power consummation was considered as reference point to evaluate the effectiveness of cell zooming in other works. From all works, it can be firstly noticed that static (regular) switch-off algorithms give power saving of 50% as maximum since they can switch off not more than 12 hours.…”

Energy savings in LTE macro base stations

“…The prototype of the adaptive transmit system has been embedded into a test environment to characterize the system performance for the proposed techniques, the sleep modes [13] and adaptive modes. The experimental investigations based on dynamic operation of these hardware components, by using LTE signals with the characteristics of Fig.…”