A fairness-control-based power-saving transmission scheme in OFDMA-based multi-carrier data networks

Abstract

In parallel with the amazing increase of mobile data traffic, the fast-growing requirement and development of the green communication technology have led to many energy-saving designs in mobile networks. Meanwhile, as the development of advanced cellular technologies, more than one component carrier (CC) can be jointly utilized in a base station (BS). As a result, the energy consumption of the BS has become an important concern. In this study, we thus propose a novel efficient power-saving scheme for the BS transmission to address the problem of the power minimization at BS transceiver subject to certain quality-of-service and fairness requirements for users. For this scheme, it is able to dynamically activate/deactivate CCs to utilize only the necessary power to enable energy-efficient data transmissions with the efficient control of the user fairness. In our model, activities in downlink data transmissions of a BS with multiple OFDMA-based CCs are considered, while concurrently supporting different types of users. Numerical results show that the total power consumption of our proposed scheme is significantly better than that of the case in which all CCs are always active when the traffic load is relatively light.