Bit per Joule and area energy-efficiency of heterogeneous macro base station sites

Due to technological development, cellular operators during last decade deploy macro base stations (BSs) of different cellular accesses technologies. Because of a long lifetime of macro BSs spanning over a decade, base stations of the second (2G), third (3G) and fourth (4G) generation can recently be found installed on the same macro base station sites. In this paper, we analyze area consumption and Bit per Joule energy efficiency of such BSs sites composed of 2G, 3G and 4G macro base stations. Analyses have been performed for the case of urban BSs sites, also taking into account BSs of the same technologies working in different frequency ranges. Obtained results show influence of BSs transmitted power and inter-site distance on the area power consumption and area Bit per Joule efficiency.