Reducing the power of wireless terminals by adaptive baseband processing

In this paper, we illustrate specific power savings obtained from exploiting a reconfigurable mobile terminal under the 3GPP LTE standard. Building on traditional link adaptation towards maximum throughput and extended towards minimal power consumption, we add two flexible baseband components: the turbo decoder and the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) detector. Optimizing their configuration leads to larger power savings when compared to non-flexible systems only performing link adaptation. The gain observed strongly depends on the scenario. For low-activity set-ups with a few minutes of voice per day, the idle power dominates and the active data rate is relatively low. This makes analog front-end and time-domain processing dominant given their constant power consumption while MIMO detection and turbo decoding that scale with data rate play a smaller role. Still, because of its ability to improve the system spectral efficiency and hence reduce its duty cycle, an advanced MIMO detector can save 10% in power consumption, on the condition that the network requires to use MIMO. Otherwise single input single output is more power-efficient in downlink. In high-throughput scenarios, larger gains are obtained. The flexible MIMO detector can save up to 35% of average power consumption. The turbo decoding also brings some gain, saving up to 12% of power when the full bandwidth is allocated to a single user.