How green the LTE technology can be?

Abstract

Reducing Carbon emissions in general in ICT from the present 3 percent and in particular in Mobile communications has been of a serious concern. In the next generation cellular technologies like LTE, base stations are very energy hungry, as they need to provide high spectral efficiency and wide coverage. Given that there is no cooling required for modern systems, the transmit power in a typical link is the most important constituent in a base station. This is mainly due to its power amplifiers and also due to energy loss in the power supply. LTE uses OFDM in downlink, which requires huge complex computations, and the power consumption of the transceiver hardware. With the latest CMOS technology, a two-fold reduction in the operating voltage from 130 nm technology to 22 nm technology, results in a four-fold reductions in the transceiver power consumption. With the LTE technology poised to take off, it is interesting to see the energy consumption assessment of LTE considering the projection of technology and exploiting the different mode of operation and the methods of reducing energy consumption. This paper discusses about the various possibilities and makes a practical assessment of a possible green form of LTE.