Towards a deployment tool for wireless access networks with minimal power consumption

The power consumption of wireless access networks will become an important issue in the coming years. In this paper, the power consumption of base stations for mobile WiMAX, HSPA, and LTE is modelled. This power consumption is related to the coverage of the base station. The considered technologies are compared according to their energy efficiency for different bit rates at a bandwidth of 5 MHz. For this particular case and based on the assumptions of parameters of the specifications, HSPA is the least energy-efficient technology. Until a bit rate of 11 Mbps LTE is the most energy-efficient while for higher bit rates mobile WiMAX performs the best. Furthermore the influence of MIMO is investigated. A decrease of about 80% for mobile WiMAX and about 74% for HSPA and LTE for the power consumption per covered area is found for a 4×4 MIMO system compared to a SISO system. The introduction of MIMO has thus a positive influence on the energy efficiency of the considered technologies. The power consumption and coverage model for base stations is then used to develop a prediction tool for power consumption in wireless access networks.