Reduced Early Handover for Energy Saving in LTE Networks

Long-term evolution (LTE) facilitates users with high data rate at the cost of increased energy consumption. eNodeBs are main energy hungry elements in LTE networks. Since power consumption directly affects the operational expenditure, thus the provision of cost effective services with adequate quality of service (QoS) has become a major challenge. This letter exploits the phenomenon of handover and presents a novel hybrid idea of reduced early handover with bandwidth expansion to achieve improved energy saving in LTE networks. Through system level simulations, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated. It is shown that the proposed energy saving scheme achieves around 35% energy efficiency compared to benchmark and other state of the art while still maintaining acceptable level of radio link failure.