Energy Efficiency Aspects of Base Station Deployment Strategies for Cellular Networks

In the strive for lessening of the environmental impact of the information and communication industry, energy consumption of communication networks has recently received increased attention. Although cellular networks account for a rather small share of energy use, lowering their energy consumption appears beneficial from an economical perspective. In this regard, the deployment of small, low power base stations, alongside conventional sites is often believed to greatly lower the energy consumption of cellular radio networks. This paper investigates on the impact of deployment strategies on the power consumption of mobile radio networks. We consider layouts featuring varying numbers of micro base stations per cell in addition to conventional macro sites. We introduce the concept of area power consumption as a system performance metric and employ simulations to evaluate potential improvements of this metric through the use of micro base stations. The results suggest, that for scenarios with full traffic load, the use of micro base stations has a rather moderate effect on the area power consumption of a cellular network.