Energy Efficient Cellular Networks: A Survey

In recent years, the cellular network market has shown a rapid growth and with the advent of new technologies, the cellular data traffic has increased significantly which has led to excessive power consumption of the network devices. In this paper, we present a brief survey on techniques to enhance the power efficiency of the cellular network. On the basis of recent study it seems that base stations consume a major part of the energy in the cellular system. We put forward a few techniques to minimize the energy consumption with the energy efficient hardware design like power saving via sleep mode and network self organizing methods that involve cell zooming, and multi layered cellular architecture. Lastly, this paper also includes a brief survey of the enabling technologies such ascognitive radio, MIMO, Femtocells and cooperative relaying.