Enhancing Energy Efficiency in LTE with Antenna Muting

The concept of antenna muting for reducing energy consumption in LTE is presented and system level evaluation results are provided. The results indicate that antenna muting can reduce the energy consumption with up to around 50% in a low load scenario without significantly affecting the user throughput. Results for 4TX, 2TX, and 1TX cell configurations are presented. The system level simulator used includes detailed models of UE pre-coder selection and feedback and we show in this paper that these algorithms performs well also when antennas are muted in a way that was not considered during the design of the algorithms. Antenna muting is a promising technique that operates on a rather short time scale in order to reduce the energy consumption of an LTE cell.