SFBC MIMO Energy Efficiency Improvements of Common Packet Schedulers for the Long Term Evolution Downlink

It is desirable that energy performance improvement is not realized at the expense of other network performance parameters. This paper investigates the trade off between energy efficiency, spectral efficiency and user QoS performance for a multi-cell multi-user radio access network. Specifically, the energy consumption ratio (ECR) and the spectral efficiency of several common frequency domain packet schedulers in a cellular E- UTRAN downlink are compared for both the SISO transmission mode and the 2×2 Alamouti Space Frequency Block Code (SFBC) MIMO transmission mode. It is well known that the 2×2 SFBC MIMO transmission mode is more spectrally efficient compared to the SISO transmission mode, however, the relationship between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency is undecided. It is shown that, for the E-UTRAN downlink with fixed transmission power, spectral efficiency improvement results into energy efficiency improvement. The effect of SFBC MIMO versus SISO on the user QoS performance is also studied.