Energy efficiency gains through traffic offloading and traffic expansion in joint macro pico deployment

The traffic demand in future mobile cellular networks is expected to increase exponentially which would lead to dense base station deployment and eventually higher energy consumption. The current dominant mobile systems including GSM and UMTS were not designed with focus on energy efficiency. This paper investigates the energy saving potential of pico nodes in a heterogeneous network from an incumbent operator consideration. The results show that the number of hotspots and the user distribution in the hotspots strongly effects the power saving. Also, sleep modes in pico base stations have shown to reduce the energy loss to almost half. On a day average with limited utilization of pico base station, the heterogeneous network scenario provides marginal saving. The results also show that if the pico base station resources are fully utilized, premium user case, the heterogeneous network scenario can provide substantial reduction in energy per bit.