Minimizing Base Station Power Consumption

We propose a new radio resource management algorithm which aims at minimizing the base station supply power consumption for multi-user MIMO-OFDM. Given a base station power model that establishes a relation between the RF transmit power and the supply power consumption, the algorithm optimizes the trade-off between three basic power-saving mechanisms: antenna adaptation, power control and discontinuous transmission. The algorithm comprises two steps: a) the first step estimates sleep mode duration, resource shares and antenna configuration based on average channel conditions and b) the second step exploits instantaneous channel knowledge at the transmitter for frequency selective time-variant channels. The proposed algorithm finds the number of transmit antennas, the RF transmission power per resource unit and spatial channel, the number of discontinuous transmission time slots, and the multi-user resource allocation, such that supply power consumption is minimized. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm is capable of reducing the supply power consumption by between 25% and 40%, dependend on the system load.