A Novel Sleep Mode Operation for Energy Efficient LTE Cellular Networks: A Sum Product Algorithm Implementation

The exponential growth of wireless technologies and usage, in recent years, has accentuated a new issue in the design of future mobile cellular systems, namely, the energy consumption of the Radio Access Network (RAN). In a typical cellular mobile network, most of the energy is consumed by the Base Stations (BS). Recent studies have revealed significant spatial and temporal traffic load imbalances in the RANs. This results in some BSs being lightly loaded while others are heavily loaded. This paper proposes a novel sleep mode operation that exploits the traffic load dynamics in order to provide energy saving opportunities. The sleep mode operation is implemented using the sum product algorithm (SPA) by iteratively exchanging messages among the cells in order to invoke the sleep modes. The proposed sleep mode operation is shown to produce operational power reduction gains of up to 36%.