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Energy Efficiency of Heterogeneous Networks in LTE-Advanced

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Abstract

Traditionally mobile operators have met the surge in mobile data traffic and the growing number of rural subscribers by deploying more macro base stations. This increases overall energy consumption, operational costs and carbon footprint of cellular networks. In this paper we investigate solutions for reducing the number and size of active macrocells following traffic load conditions in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. Results are presented as overall energy reduction gains for homogeneous macro-only and micro-only networks and heterogeneous joint macro-relay and micro-relay networks, using long-term-evolution-advanced technology. Results show that reducing the number of active cells using sleep mode at base stations, in low to medium traffic load conditions, combined with the deployment of small cells offer energy gains in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. However, the most significant gains are observed in heterogeneous networks.

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Notes

  1. A relay node is a well-developed base station that serves a smaller number of users (compared to a macro eNB) and connects to its donor base station using a wireless backhaul link, which consumes part of the base station frequency bandwidth.

  2. In reality macro base stations equipment may be designed to be energy-efficient for large cells deployments and the re-use of such equipment in small cells may result in further energy loss [6].

  3. Energy consumption in the core network is ignored compared to that in the radio access network [15, 16].

  4. Detailed simulation assumptions and deployment scenarios for these three relay power levels are available in references [17, 18].

  5. These models are derived based on information available from several mobile operators, telecom equipment vendors [21–23] and the open literature on the ‘Green Radio’ project [20, 24], on state-of-the-art base station equipment.

  6. This model is proposed purely for numerical convenience and may offer different results to those obtained from real relay equipment.

  7. A 5-year lifecycle is expected for customer-grade equipment such as that of wireless LAN (WLAN) access points.

  8. The baseline scenario is similar to that in current LTE networks with macro eNBs “always on” even in low data traffic conditions to deliver signaling messages (control overhead).

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Acknowledgements

The work reported has formed part of the Green Radio Core 5 Research Programme of the Virtual Centre of Excellence (VCE) in Mobile and Personal Communications www.mobilevce.com. This research is funded by the Industrial Companies who are members of Mobile VCE and by the UK EPSRC under Grant Numbers EP/G060584/1, EP/G06041X/1, EP/G062420/1 and EP/G064105/1. We would like to acknowledge Tim Harrold (Bristol University) and Simon Armour (Bristol University) for providing base station models, and both David Lister (Vodafone) and Simon Fletcher (NEC) for their valuable feedback and useful comments.

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  1. School of Engineering and Electronics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Chadi Khirallah & John S. Thompson

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  1. Chadi Khirallah
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  2. John S. Thompson
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Correspondence to Chadi Khirallah.

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Khirallah, C., Thompson, J.S. Energy Efficiency of Heterogeneous Networks in LTE-Advanced. J Sign Process Syst 69, 105–113 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-011-0637-3

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