Power management in LTE networks by applying intelligent agents

The improvement of energy efficiency in wireless cellular networks has become a popular topic in recent years due to its positive effects on the environment and economical benefits for network operators. An effective way to improve energy efficiency is to deploy energy-efficient base stations and turn as many base stations off as possible. In this paper, we consider an LTE network composed by the new base stations invented by Alcatel-Lucent - Light Radio Cubes (cube), and propose a power management scheme. The power management scheme assumes that each cube has an intelligent agent (IA), and through mining network traffic, each IA requests its associated cube to turn on or off, adjust radiation power, or change beam direction. Through extensive experiments, we find that this IA-based power management scheme is able to save more than 50% power while not deteriorating network performance.