Energy saving techniques applied over a nation-wide mobile network

Inhalt:
Traffic carried over wireless networks has grown significantly in recent years and actual forecasts show that this trend is expected to continue. However, the rapid mobile data explosion and the need for higher data rates comes at a cost of increased complexity and energy consumption of the mobile networks. Although base station equipment is improving its energy efficiency by means of new power amplifiers and increased processing power, additional techniques are required to further reduce the energy consumption. In this paper, we evaluate different energy saving techniques and study their impact on the energy consumption based on a nation-wide network of a leading European operator. By means of an extensive analysis, we show that with the proposed techniques significant energy savings can be realized.