Power-Aware ON/OFF Switching Strategies of ENodeB for Green LTE Networks

Enormous growth in broadband communications over the last decade has propelled the ICT sector to become one of the main industries that drain large percentage of annual global energy consumption. This has coincided with an era which is witnessing declining availability of traditional energy resources and proactive research for renewable green/clean sources of energy. In cellular communications, base stations are typically responsible for nearly 60 percent of energy demand associated with cellular services. Accordingly, recent research on energy efficient strategies to manage base station operation has become of the ultimate essence. In this paper, two new strategies for ON/OFF switching of eNodeB in LTE based on transmission power requirements are proposed. The first proposed strategy termed Power-Based (PB) strategy assigns switching OFF priority for eNodeB that exhibit the highest power requirement to support user equipment (UE) within the corresponding cell. The second proposed Power Ratio-Based (PRB) strategy, on the other hand, ranks candidate eNodeB for switching OFF on the basis of ratio between its transmission power requirements and the power that shall be consumed by neighboring eNodeB in order to handle its offloaded traffic. Simulation results conducted over different scenarios and various traffic mixes indicate that the proposed strategies enhance power savings when compared to recent strategies proposed in the literature that rank candidate eNodeB for switching OFF based on of average distance between eNodeB and UE under their supervision.