Energy efficient load sharing in LTE-A HetNets

This paper addresses energy efficiency and throughput performance of joint LTE-A macrocell and femtocell deployment. We consider two techniques discontinuous transmission (DTX) and offloading of users from macrocells to lower power femtocells. When the DTX is applied base stations delay transmissions until sufficient user data is available to transmit using 40 percent or more of the system bandwidth. This allows the base stations to remain inactive for larger periods of time, and therefore reducing energy consumption. The target is to reduce the overall network energy consumption per area with minimal impact to the throughput. The numerical results show that when the majority of macrocell users can be offloaded to be served by femtocells the mean power per area consumption will decrease by up to 34.7 percent and at the same time a larger portion of users are able to meet the intended throughput target. When DTX is applied energy consumption is reduced further still to 45.3 percent.