Link Level Resource Allocation Strategies for Green Communications in LTE-Advanced

Abstract

Mobile operators are showing a growing concern for energy efficiency in cellular networks in the recent past not only to maintain profitability, but also to tackle the overall environment effects. Such a trend is motivating the standardization bodies, network operators and researchers to aggressively explore techniques to reduce the energy consumption in the network. This trend has stimulated the interest of researchers in an innovative new research area called green cellular networks which is a vast research discipline that needs to cover all the layers of the protocol stack and various system architectures. Since Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A), which promises better support to richer applications, is fast emerging as the next generation cellular network standard and expected to aggravate the energy consumption problem, various techniques have been proposed and researched to improve its energy efficiency. This chapter discusses three link level techniques that attempt to reduce the energy consumption of a LTE-A cell with intelligent MAC layer algorithms.