Energy saving techniques for LTE: Integration and system level results

This paper focuses on energy saving techniques for LTE, and what overall energy savings they can achieve. The considered techniques are adaptive base station hardware, cell DTX, antenna muting, and adaptive sectorization. The paper discusses how these can be integrated and jointly save energy, and evaluates the energy savings as well as the quality of service impact by means of extensive system level evaluations of a radio access network. The system level simulations, which are carried out over 24 hours in a country-wide LTE network, indicate that these techniques together can provide energy savings in the order of 75% with only minor impact on quality of service.