A Flow Level Perspective on Base Station Power Allocation in Green Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel power allocation method for base stations that optimizes energy efficiency by considering user flow dynamics, radio conditions, and traffic patterns in LTE networks.

Contribution

It presents a new flow-level power allocation scheme that accounts for user arrivals and departures, improving energy efficiency over traditional static approaches.

Findings

Flow-aware power allocation outperforms static schemes.

Radio conditions and traffic significantly influence energy efficiency.

Dynamic schemes adapt better to user traffic variations.

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel power allocation mechanism which allows one to optimize the energy-efficiency of base stations operating in the downlink. The energy-efficiency refers to the amount of bits that can be transmitted by the base station per unit of energy consumed. This work studies the impact of flow-level dynamics on the energy efficiency of base stations, by considering user arrivals and departures. Our proposed power allocation scheme optimizes the energyefficiency, accounting for the dynamic nature of users (referred to as the global energy-efficiency). We emphasize our numerical results that study the influence of the radio conditions, transmit power and the user traffic on the energy-efficiency in an LTE compliant framework. Finally, we show that the power allocation scheme that considers traffic dynamics, is significantly different from the power allocation scheme when the number of users is considered as constant, and that it has a better performance.