Compensation of energy-efficiency degradation due to antenna-muting in distributed antenna systems for a green cellular network

Abstract

The main criteria for designing the upcoming cellular systems are: More network capacity and less energy consumption. Recently, distributed antenna system (DAS) has received considerable attention due to its potential to provide higher spectral efficiency and uniform coverage for cellular networks. In this regard, this article compares the performance of DAS with centralized antenna system (CAS) in LTE-Advanced system in term of cell throughput and energy efficiency (EE), where practical restrictions such as out-of-cell interference, path-loss, and small-scale fading are taken into account. Furthermore, the EE degradation is investigated under two different sleep-mode scenarios (moderate and low loaded networks) where different number of antennas are activated. Finally, we investigate the impact of channel bandwidth enhancement on the compensation of EE degradation due to the antenna muting during the sleep modes. The results reveal that DAS considerably outperforms CAS in term of EE (up to 56.6%). Furthermore, the simulation results show that during the sleep modes, by optimally assigning channel bandwidth, the EE-loss, not only can be compensated, but also EE can be significantly improved, where the proposed methodology guarantees a considerable power-saving for the cellular network (up to 27.63%).