Power saving by sleep modes in base station transceivers for LTE

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.