Energy savings in LTE macro base stations

In wireless access networks the traffic load varies strongly along a day and efficient concepts to adapt the power consumption of LTE macro base stations to the required traffic load are currently widely under study. Significant daily energy savings up to 35% can be achieved for different deployment scenarios by introducing energy adaptive hardware features in combination with energy aware scheduling strategies. Feasibility studies have been performed for macro base stations by using system level simulations and hardware prototypes. Different scheduling strategies like bandwidth adaptation, capacity adaptation, micro discontinuous transmission and combinations of them have been evaluated. They show the potential of these energy aware approaches to optimize the power reduction in energy adaptive components as function of the traffic load. It could be demonstrated that bandwidth adaptation in combination with deactivation of components when no user data is to be transmitted have the highest potential in daily energy savings.