Energy-Efficient Planning Tool for WCDMA Heterogeneous Network Deployment

Abstract

The population of powerful mobile network technologies has increased in recent years also focus has been shifting from second generation mobile to third generation technology. This higher access rates have led to increased energy consumption in base stations (BTS) and network densities have been constantly growing. This paper developed an energy efficient planning tool for analytical modeling of heterogeneous networks and observed the potential energy savings statistics when deploying heterogeneous networks. A model developed from wcdma downlink equation was used in determining the energy consumption per unit area of the network. The model was also used to observe how heterogeneous network deployment contributes to the total energy consumption of the network. The result was presented in three scenarios. The first scenario presented the daily energy consumption per square kilometer and it was observed that the energy consumption by the macrocell decreases when increasing the ratio of femtocells in the network. However, the introduction of femtocells to the network ordinarily does not gauranty decrease in energy consumption the scenario depends on the power budget of the femtocells as presented in second and third scenarios where power budget of 2 W and 5 W were used respectively. By introducing femtocell of low power budget into the network, the density of the network reduces therefore, bringing about reasonable reduction in the total power consumption of the network. To that end, this research developed software that helps to observe the total energy that could be saved when deploying heterogeneous networks.