Dynamic bandwidth management for energy savings in wireless base stations

The daily traffic variation over time and space requires dimensioning of base stations for high data transmission peaks. This means, that for a major part of the day power is wasted due to over provisioning. To save energy at lower traffic load scenarios we propose a stepwise adaptation of the bandwidth usage. LTE offers a wide spectrum of possible channel bandwidth usage, specified in steps of 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 20 MHz. A stepwise adaptation of the maximum number of resource blocks that are used during each LTE subframe can be applied to adapt the power consumption to the average traffic load. With the higher channel bandwidth more resource blocks can be utilized and more traffic load can be supported. The energy saving potential for macro base stations has been calculated for adaptive power amplifiers to be up to 20.9% and 25% along a day, based on daily dense urban and rural traffic profiles, respectively.