New scheduling scheme for green communications in long term evolution networks

Green communications has been paid much attention recently, to provide energy efficient networks with a high level of quality of service (QoS). In this study, the authors propose a cross-layer scheduling scheme for the downlink of long-term evolution networks, considering the buffer state which may be empty in some times. Their target is to minimise energy consumption under the constraints of limited average transmitting power in the base station, and maximum tolerable delay as QoS of heterogeneous users. In the proposed scheme, the authors use an effective capacity link layer model to consider the data link layer characteristics, such as probability of non-empty buffer and probability of maximum delay, along with the physical layer parameters. Simulation results show more than 48% reduction of energy consumption in peak traffic loads.