Modeling the hardware power consumption of large scale antenna systems

In order to address the ever-increasing need for wireless throughput while reducing the power consumption of cellular base stations, many approaches are developed at network, base station or component level. One of the most innovative ones is known as massive MIMO or large-scale antenna systems (LSAS). By using hundreds of antennas at the base station, the system promises to offer a large throughput at reduced total radiated power. This paper presents a power model for cellular base stations and its application to LSAS. Its role is central in order to determine whether the reduced total radiated power of LSAS base stations also translates into reduced total power consumption for the base station, after taking all components supporting the many antenna chains into account. Based on the modeling outcome, LSAS turns out to be a promising approach in order to reduce the power consumption of cellular base stations by a factor 10, while offering more throughput. While the research community is working on the many interesting challenges of this technology, we can conclude that from the point of view of power consumption, it is a valid alternative to traditional designs, and it will benefit even more from technology scaling in the coming years.