Spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency tradeoff for heterogeneous wireless networks

To meet the global challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the explosive demand of wireless data traffic, green architecture design is becoming a critical issue for mobile network operators. Heterogeneous deployments of different cell types have been used to fulfill the challenges mentioned above. In this respect, a critical concern for operators is how to deploy small cells in a green manner such that the global network is spectrum-efficient as well as energy-efficient. In this paper, we characterize the spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) for heterogenous wireless networks, taking into account realistic network power consumption model and dynamic network configuration. We give first order closed form analysis to address this issue and show that SE and EE may not be contradictory to each other as in the traditional networks. Our study also provides useful insights for the modeling and deployment of future green wireless networks.