Concepts for energy efficient LTE transceiver systems in macro base stations

In today´s macro base stations, the transceiver system is one of the most power-consuming components, simply due to low energy efficiency of the power amplifier. The decreased performance in medium and low load situations gives significant room for energy saving. For exploiting this potential, different concepts are proposed by the EARTH project to mitigate the energy wastage in transceiver systems. The deployment of LTE brings the opportunity for using load aware components to minimize the energy consumption, and thereby the CO2 emissions and the operational expenses due to cellular networks. Special attention is paid to optimise the performance in medium and low load scenarios, which occur most of the time. The proposed concept “Signal Load Adaptive Transceiver System”, implements dynamic adaptation of transceiver components to achieve higher energy efficiencies. In this paper, individual concepts for transceiver blocks are presented, the performance improvements are shown by power characteristics of the transceiver system, and the impact on energy efficiency improvement is evaluated by examples based on different application scenarios.