Design Approaches for Energy Efficient LTE Access Network

Abstract

The unprecedented growth in mobile data demand since the last decade requires paradigm shift in the design and deployment of telecom access network. OFDMA based Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology provides high spectral efficiency owing to several features such as multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), open and closed loop beamforming, carrier aggregation (CA), OFDM with higher modulation order, massive MIMO, etc. to meet the data capacity requirement. However, these features involve a large number of transceivers and suffer from high peak to average power ratio, which in turn increases the power consumption of eNBs. Conventionally, the coverage and capacity needs are fulfilled with more number of newlinemacro eNB. However, this approach is no longer helpful because of the interference from neighboring cells. Higher power consumption of eNB and more eNBs obviously have an adverse effect on the OPEX of the access network. Thus, there is a need for reducing power consumption in the eNBs and decreasing the number of macro eNBs by incorporating more number of small cells in the access network which in turn helps in reducing the overall power consumption throughout the deployment lifecycle including design, build and operate (DBO) stages. It is known that small cells in addition to macro eNB cater to the localized coverage with benefits of improved data throughput and lower power consumption. However, collective newlineuse of macro and small cells asks for better RF planning and continuous optimization in the network. This in turn demands for thorough validation of the attempts of curbing power consumption using network statistics and field measurements. newline newline