Optimizing cellular network architectures to minimize energy consumption

The energy consumption of different cellular network architectures are analyzed. In particular, a comparison of the transmit energy consumption between a single large cell with multiple co-located antennas, multiple micro-cells with a single antenna at each cell, and a large cell with a distributed antenna system are presented. The influence of different system parameters such as cell size, spatial distribution of the users, and the availability of channel state information (CSI) toward the total required transmit energy are analyzed. It is shown that the current macro-cellular architecture with co-located antennas has poor energy efficiency in the absence of CSI, but has better energy efficiency than small cells when perfect CSI is available. Moreover, macro-cells with distributed antennas have the best energy efficiency of all three architectures under perfect CSI. These results shed light on design guidelines to improve the energy efficiency of cellular network architectures.