Power-efficient base station operation through user QoS-aware adaptive RF chain switching technique

In this paper, we develop a user Quality of Service (QoS) aware adaptive Radio Frequency (RF) chain switching technique that dynamically adapts the number of active RF chains to minimize the total power consumption of the base station (BS). Specifically, we first formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total power consumption under the throughput and Block Error Rate (BLER) requirements of the users of the BS. Due to the prohibitive complexity of exhaustive algorithm achieving an optimal solution, we propose a practically implementable heuristic algorithm, which jointly optimizes the number of active RF chains, frequency and time resources. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve significant savings in total power consumption of the BSs compared to the conventional static All-On scheme wherein the activity of RF chains is not adapted.