System level performance of energy efficient dynamic mechanical antenna tilt angle switching in LTE-Advanced systems

Energy consumption in current cellular communication systems becomes more and more critical with the demand for higher throughput and explosive growth of terminal equipment. However, the consumption is evitable in low traffic load time or area, e.g. in late-night. In order to reduce system energy consumption, power off low load base stations is an easy and effective way to reduce energy consumption, but lead to the problem of damaging the coverage performance. In this paper, we studied the effect of adjusting mechanical tilt angle and transmit power of base stations in an ergodic way after shut down adjacent idle base stations. Compared with traditional shutdown method, the changing of mechanical tilt and transmit power jointly can effectively help maintain coverage and lower system power consumption. Evaluation has been done under the LTE-Advanced system level simulation.