An efficient power-saving transmission mechanism in LTE macrocell-femtocell hybrid networks

Abstract

The energy minimization plays an important role in access networks especially the macrocell base station (MBS) for green communications to cope with the problem of the so huge energy consumption, the rising energy cost, and the carbon dioxide emission. According to various academic and industry surveys, two-tier macrocell-femtocell networks should be the key network architecture to reduce the total power consumption of the MBSs. Also, Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems are expected to improve the network capacity with full mobility. In this paper, an efficient power-saving transmission mechanism is proposed in two-tier LTE macrocell-femtocell networks for dynamically managing transceivers at femtocell BSs (FBSs) to improve the energy-saving performance. The proposed mechanism allows grouped FBSs to smartly activate/deactivate, respectively, based on dynamic traffic loads, to address the energy minimization problem for transceivers at both MBSs and FBSs, while maintaining at a pre-determined data rate. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed one is able to achieve a much better energy-saving performance, when compared with that of existing approaches.