Energy Savings in Wireless Base Stations by Adapting System Resources

The daily traffic variation over time requires dimensioning of base stations for high data transmission peaks. This means, that for a major part of the day power is wasted due to over provisioning. To save energy at lower traffic load we propose an adaptation of the resource usage. We use a combination of blanking a part of the LTE subframes and of stepwise adaptation of the maximum number of resource blocks used during the loaded subframes. With our innovative adaptive transceiver technology this adapts the power consumption to the average traffic load. The energy saving potential for macro base stations has been calculated to be up to 30% along a day, based on daily dense urban and rural traffic profiles, respectively. Including further improvements of BS hardware according to the EARTH integrated solution achieve savings up to 70%.