Energy consumption assessment in LTE baseband of eNodeB and guidelines for green baseband subsystems

Energy consumption is an issue in general in information and communication technologies (ICT), but also cellular communications in particular. Base station sites are the main energy consumers in a mobile network. Their energy consumption significantly contributes to green house gas (CO₂) emissions. Hence, service providers are looking for energy saving solutions in their existing and future deployments which in turn reduces the CO₂ foot print and operational costs. There is a little study in assessing energy requirements of baseband functions of base station (e-nodeb) due to its energy consumption contribution is significantly low when compared to other more energy hungry components such as power amplifiers, analog frontend and protocols. In this paper, we have assessed energy consumption in MIMO-OFDM baseband functions of LTE eNodeB on a typical multi-core processor. In particular, implementing such computationally complex algorithms energy efficiently pose certain challenges such as less complex algorithm selection, architecture selection, algorithm architecture mapping, and energy management strategies. We have given the guide lines for addressing these challenges.