An Intriguing Relation Between the Power Consumption and Number of Antenna Elements in Multi-Beam Phased Arrays

An improved system-level power consumption model (PCM) for 5G base station multi-beam phased-array transmit architectures is developed. Using this model, it is shown that an optimum number of antenna elements of the array exists with respect to the total power consumption. The proposed model is benchmarked against a recent study which is shown to underestimate the total power consumed in analog and digital antenna systems by 37% and 126% respectively.