Impact of traffic growth on energy consumption of LTE networks between 2010 and 2020

This paper evaluates the evolution of energy consumption of LTE networks between 2010 and 2020. We make use of system level simulation to assess the impact of several green levers on energy consumption. The work is based on realistic models of traffic growth and realistic models of base stations power consumption, along with their expected evolution. The models and assumptions used have been issued from real measurements, established and validated by the GreenTouch consortium. The paper shows that the introduction of small cells and the use of green software features like sleep mode and load balancing can maintain the energy consumption stable despite of the traffic growth. Furthermore, we show that the energy savings due to green hardware swap based on future evolution is also very promising and should drastically reduce the network consumption by a factor of 3.