A Forecasting Driven Technique Enabling Power Saving in LTE Cellular Networks

Nowadays, the pursuit of energy efficiency is one of the main challenges of present and future mobile communications. The growth of the mobile communication market which has been increased by the proliferation of smartphones and laptops and the rising of data traffic subscriptions claims for an improvement of network capacity and, consequently, of the infrastructure. In this scenario, in order to contain operative expenditures, the network operators must pay attention to energy saving strategies that may eventually also contribute to reduction of greenhouse emissions. In this paper, the exponential smoothing technique is applied to achieve a traffic forecast for all the coverage area, considering daily and weekly data communication trends: in particular, the base station transmission power can be adapted in order to save energy and guarantee the requested network capacity. Results show the effectiveness of traffic forecast technique for the prediction of the requested capacity and for the maximization of the energy efficiency, allowing performance very close to the optimum case.