Toward self-organizing sectorization of LTE eNBs for energy efficient network operation under QoS constraints

Energy efficiency is one of the central concerns for future cellular networks, which could be accomplished by adaptively reconfiguring the networks with the changing traffic environment. In this paper, we propose and analyze a dynamic sectorization scheme of evolved node Bs (eNBs) in long term evolution (LTE) systems for saving energy at radio access network (RAN) level. Under the proposal, based on the instantaneous traffic, each eNB dynamically reconfigures itself in real-time utilizing minimum number of sectors, while maintaining the quality of service (QoS). The proposed technique is implemented in each eNB requiring no correspondence with other eNBs, while no human intervention is required as well. Thus, the proposed technique is of distributed and self-organizing in nature. We thoroughly investigate the performance of the proposed system under a wide range of traffic scenarios, eNB power profiles, user distributions and QoS requirements. Simulation results indicate a significant reduction in network energy consumption. Furthermore, the proposed technique is simple, but effective and easy to implement. Comparison with other research is also presented, which proves the superiority of our proposal.