Abstract-With the explosion of wireless communications in number of users and data rates, the reduction of network power consumption becomes more and more critical. This is especially true for base stations which represent a dominant share of the total power in cellular networks. In order to study power reduction techniques, a convenient power model is required, providing estimates of the power consumption in different scenarios. This paper proposes such a model, accurate but simple to use. It evaluates the base station power consumption for different types of cells supporting the 3GPP LTE standard. It is flexible enough to enable comparisons between state-of-the-art and advanced configurations, and an easy adaptation to various scenarios. The model is based on a combination of base station components and sub-components as well as power scaling rules as functions of the main system parameters.

Besides this operator cost issue, the rising energy consumption of mobile networks also contributes to the global emission of greenhouse gases and to global warming. Mobile network infrastructure (without mobile devices) emitted 64 Mtonns of CO 2 in 2002 and increases are projected through 2020 to 178 Mtonns [9]. Both cost and climate issues of mobile networks have recently drawn significant attention to the improvement of their energy efficiency in research initiatives [12,16,24] and conferences [18,26]. Network operators have announced reduction plans for their energy usage [27] and equipment manufacturers have reported a significant increase in base station power efficiency [6,8].The major source of power consumption in mobile networks stems from the radio base stations [20]. Therefore, power saving methods developed and deployed today mainly focus on three areas:

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