Energy efficiency of cellular base stations with ternary-state transceivers

The energy efficiency of cellular base stations is known to be improved by having the base station in sleep modes whenever possible. In this paper we present our study on ternary state transceivers for cellular base stations for further improving the energy efficiency. We consider transceivers that are capable of switching between sleep, stand-by and active modes whenever required. the ternary state transceiver is modeled as a three-state Markov process and we present an algorithm to intelligently change the states of the transceivers based on the offered traffic to the base station whilst maintaining a prescribed minimum rate per user. We present simulation results considering a typical macro base station with state changeable transceivers. Our results show that it is possible to significantly improve the energy efficiency of the base station using the proposed algorithm and further show that the algorithm approaches steady state conditions for the range of parametric values that we consider in our study. © 2015 IEEE.