Evaluation of the potential for energy-efficient design based on group users behavior in 3GPP IMT-advanced systems

Energy efficient design is an important issue for 3GPP IMT-Advanced systems which contribute not only to goals for sustainable development, but also to the profitability of the telecommunication industry. In recent literatures users characteristics and behavior have been widely studied to improve the networks??? energy-efficiency. In this paper we present the concept of group users behavior (GUB) which characterizes the general behavior, pattern and rules of a group of users in a certain geographical area for a certain time window, for example, user requirements, users social character, user traffics fluctuations (temporal and spatial domain), users mobility, etc. To evaluate the potentials of energy-efficiency based on GUB in LTE networks, first a complete system and link level simulation platform is established according to 3GPP LTE R10 standards. Then based on this platform massive simulations are performed to evaluate the impact on energy-efficiency of GUB in LTE network, and a novel energy-efficient GUB-based small cell (micro eNB in LTE system) sleep scheme for heterogeneous wireless network under different GUB in time/space domain is proposed and studied. Simulation results validate the our analysis and demonstrate that our energy efficient small cell sleep scheme can lead to 20% power deduction compared with the traditional scheme.