Energy efficiency of downlink packet scheduling in CoMP

Abstract

The foreseen increase in the volume of mobile traffic and the correspondent increase in greenhouse gas emissions is now placing energy efficiency (EE) at the forefront of mobile network design. As a step towards incorporating more energy friendly mobile platforms in future networks, Third Generation Partnership Project Long-Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced has adopted Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission/reception because of its ability to mitigate and/or coordinate inter-cell interference. However, there is room for reducing energy consumption further by exploiting the inherent flexibility of dynamic resource allocation protocols. To this end packet scheduling schemes play a fundamental role in multi-user scenarios and provide a potential research playground for optimising energy consumption in future networks. However, there is no effective benchmark in place for experimenting new design approaches. This paper provides a first attempt to analyse the Energy Efficiency of different downlink packet scheduling in CoMP for LTE networks using classical packet scheduling algorithm approaches such as Maximum Carrier to Interference ratio (MCI), Proportional Fairness (PF) and the Round Robin scheduling (RR), and provides some input to future comparison considerations.