Uplink Energy Efficiency in LTE Systems

This paper proposes a new method to model the instantaneous uplink (UL) energy efficiency (EE) of a mobile terminal when it is transmitting to a base station using the Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. It is known that the transmitted power can vary significantly, mainly depending on the used modulation code scheme (MCS), or the path loss between the user equipment (UE) and the eNodeB (eNB), or even the number of resource blocks (RBs) used to send the data. Even though this transmitted power, also known as irradiated power, does not correspond to the final power consumption during an UL transmission, its variability has an impact on it. Unlike existing models, this paper considers the power consumed in the radio frequency chain and the power consumed by the baseband processing. The proposed model is expected to improve the accuracy of the theoretic measurements of both the power consumption and the EE of UL transmissions in LTE systems.