Evaluating the Energy Efficiency of LTE-Advanced Relay and Picocell Deployments

As wireless communications experience tremendous growth, energy consumption is becoming a crucial problem in the wireless industry. Energy saving mechanisms are important for supporting the mobility and extending the battery life of a user equipment, reducing the operation costs of a network operator, enhancing corporate image of operators and vendors alike, and providing a lower total energy consumption which reflects in a lower environmental impact. Herein, we evaluate the energy efficiency of different small node deployments, namely relay nodes and Picocells, within the 3GPP LTE-Advanced framework. The energy efficiency of small node deployments is considered on both the uplink and downlink of 3GPP-defined urban and suburban models. In specific, the work investigates the impact of deploying different numbers of small nodes on reducing area power consumption, or alternatively, on enhancing the throughput power consumption of access networks.