Dynamic traffic-aware reconfiguration of spectral/energy efficient cellular networks

Traditional wireless communication systems focus on Spectral Efficiency (SE) with excessive energy consumption. With widespread attention on global warming and excessive energy consumption, system designers began focusing on energy efficiency (EE) instead of the traditional spectral efficiency. A system that maximizes either spectral efficiency or energy efficiency without taking into account the variation of traffic load will lead to poor system performance in terms of outage probability, throughput and energy efficiency. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a Dynamic Traffic-aware Reconfiguration (DTR) scheme, aiming at maximizing the average system EE while guaranteeing the required system performance. This is fulfilled by reconfiguring the system to SE, EE or hybrid SE-EE system according to the traffic load. The key criterion for reconfiguring the system is the outage probability, which is estimated through using a queuing model. We implement DTR scheme in 3GPP LTE system level simulator and conduct intensive simulation experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed DTR scheme. Numeric results show that DTR can maximize the average EE while guaranteeing the system performance compared to pure SE or EE system.