Energy-Efficient Coordinated Scheduling Mechanism for Cellular Communication Systems with Multiple Component Carriers

The energy consumption in radio access network is expected to increase significantly as the network expends to fulfill the explosively growing data traffics. However, when evaluating the energy saving mechanisms, the impact on other performance metrics such as spectral efficiency, should also be taken into account. In this paper, based on the multiple component carrier (CC) feature specified in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) systems, an energy-efficient coordinated scheduling mechanism is proposed to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks by dynamically switching off CCs and base stations (BS) according to load variations, with special attention on the switching off order and BS transmit power adjustment to maintain service continuity of downlink users. Both the energy and spectral efficiency of the system under the proposed scheduling mechanism are analyzed. Simulation results show that when data traffics are below a quarter of the system capacity, with the proposed scheme more than half of the network power consumption can be saved, while the requirements for user data rate, service continuity, network coverage and spectral efficiency are guaranteed.