BaLAnce: Battery Lifetime-Aware LTE Switching-Off Strategy in Green Network Infrastructures

Abstract

The load-aware operation of network infrastructure is a well established green networking concept to improve the energy-efficiency of wireless communication networks. But while it has been shown that switching-off base stations in times of low traffic leads to significant savings of energy, the interdependency of such infrastructure-oriented measures on the power consumption of user equipments has not been addressed in detail so far. This paper therefore quantizes the negative impact of switching-off strategies for base stations on the battery lifetime of Long Term Evolution (LTE) devices. Therefore, the Context- Aware Power Consumption Model for LTE devices (CoPoMo) that enables an accurate quantification of the energy efficiency of devices under different network deployments, is leveraged. In order to enable a trade-off between energy savings in the infrastructure and battery lifetimes of devices on the user side, we propose a Battery-Lifetime-Aware switching-off Strategy (BaLAnce) for base stations. The results of a simulation study with a reference LTE network scenario show, that a significantly better energy trade-off can be achieved by BaLAnce.