Urban small cell deployments: Impact on the network energy consumption

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of small cell deployments in urban and dense urban areas from the energy consumption perspective. Considering a parametric power model for the legacy macrocell networks and the new emerging small cells, this study quantifies the power reduction gain by deploying heterogeneous networks consisting of a mixture of both technologies. As a part of the study, a framework is developed which determines the optimal network architecture in terms of the combination of small cells and macrocells. While the optimality is merely decided based on the overall power consumption performance, both capacity and coverage requirements are simultaneously addressed. The results presented in this paper are based on the field measured traffic demand data from the urban area of the Wellington, NZ. Additionally, the paper investigates the impact of future traffic growth and provides a 5-year outlook for energy consumption of the network. The presented numerical results confirm substantial power reduction gain from deploying small cells. This becomes even more critical in the future when the traffic demand is increasing and the offloading effects of small cells are most beneficial. Furthermore, this study suggests that improving the idle mode power consumption of small cells is one of the key areas which can enable significant total power reduction. This study can serve as a guideline for operators when estimating the power efficiency of their network.