Performance Analysis of Energy Efficient Distributed Antenna Systems

There is a huge demand for data traffic caused by increased usage of data-hungry applications on smart mobile devices. This has resulted into cellular network expansion and upgrade that have increased energy costs and generated environmental concerns. Distributed antenna systems (DAS) are applied to enhance the coverage of the cell via geographically distributed antennas elements (DAEs) which are connected to the base station that is located at the centre of the cell. In this paper, DAS is proposed as a network solution to fulfill increasing capacity demands while addressing the energy efficiency (EE) and environmental concerns associated with cellular network operation. Maximum Ratio Transmission (MRT) and Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) are applied to calculate the downlink ergodic spectral efficiency (SE), EE and energy consumption ratio (ECR). Nakagami-m fading and log-normal shadowing are considered. Our results demonstrate that DAS using MRT and FFR increases the spectral and energy efficiency of the network compared to a basic cellular network system.