Creating and sharing knowledge for telecommunications

Energy efficient load balancing for future self-organized shared networks

Monteiro, V.M. ; Huq, K. ; Mumtaz, S.M. ; Politis, C.P. ; Rodriguez, J.

Telecommunication Systems Vol. 59, Nº 1, pp. 123 - 135, May, 2015.

ISSN (print): 1018-4864
ISSN (online): 1572-9451

Scimago Journal Ranking: 0,47 (in 2015)

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1007/s11235-014-9888-1

Abstract
Energy is an expensive commodity in long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) networks, spurring a myriad of research approaches in recent years to attempt to minimize energy consumption in LTE-A, usually from the mobile users’ perspective. In this work, the energy consumption of the network is analyzed, according to the operators’ point of view. Network sharing and self-organized network (SON) technologies are attractive solutions for cost reduction, and for the minimization of energy utilization in LTE-A network. In this paper, a novel framework is provided using a self-organized load balancing (SO-LB) algorithm for minimizing energy cost per bit based on the scope of 3GPP standardization. Obtained simulation results show that by employing SO-LB algorithm in a shared network, it is possible to achieve up to 15–20 % savings in energy consumption when compared to LTE-A non-shared networks.