Analysis of impact of network activity on energy efficiency of 3GPP-LTE

The current trends in usage of wireless communication envisaged an explosive growth in terms of high data rate, number of smartphones, and high QoS. This leads to a growing concern in industry and academia for re-evaluation of design in all aspects in terms of its energy efficiency. Signalling reduction is one of the ways to improve energy-efficiency of mobile networks. Excessive signalling consumed battery power of UE as well as adds traffic to the network. Therefore, detail analysis of signalling load in future wireless standards like Third Generation Partnership Project's (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) is need of the hour. This paper provides a detail load analysis of various signalling procedure, whose increase in frequency leads to unwanted battery consumption as well as adds network load to other networking elements. Load due to idle-connected, handover, attach, and tracking are update (TAU) procedure is evaluated using probability of RRC states and number of transitions per second for a non real time data traffic. Finally, a quantitative analysis of energy savings opportunities by reducing the network activity in UE and eNodeB is presented.