Energy Efficient Link Adaptation for Downlink Transmission of LTE/LTE-A Systems

As a large percentage of the energy required by a cellular network is consumed at base station (BS) sites, how to reduce the energy consumption at BS sites has recently received much attention. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient link adaptation scheme to improve the BS's energy efficiency (EE) for long term evalution (LTE) systems. Based on the traditional spectral- efficiency centered link adaptation scheme, the proposed scheme treats transmit power as a new feedback parameter, aiming to maximize the BS's EE under a certain block error rate constraint. In addition, in order to reduce the transmit power adjustment frequency, a semi-static power control scheme is presented. Simulation results indicate that our proposed schemes can improve the BS's EE significantly.