Energy Efficiency vs. Throughput Trade-Off in an LTE-A Scenario

The growing demand of throughput, coverage and capacity has motivated the deployment of small cells as a cheaper option to macro base stations. Such heterogeneous scenario has also introduced novel advanced resource allocation and load balancing mechanisms for increased system performance. This paper proposes an approach to optimizing network performance by introducing an estimation of the energy consumption associated with the allocation of physical resources to users, as well as their offload from one serving base station to another (macro or pico). An algorithm for minimizing the energy consumption while optimizing resource allocation to pico-cell users in a wireless heterogeneous scenario is proposed and evaluated. The adopted model uses the information about the distance between the cells, their load and the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the mobile users together with an estimate of the associated energy saving. The results show that the overall network expenses related to power savings may be reduced while maintaining a high performance level of the network.