Cellular Energy Efficiency Evaluation Framework

In order to quantify the energy savings in wireless networks, the power consumption of the entire system needs to be captured and an appropriate energy efficiency evaluation framework must be defined. In this paper, the necessary enhancements over existing performance evaluation frameworks are discussed, such that the energy efficiency of the entire network comprising component, node and network level contributions can be quantified. The most important addendums over existing frameworks include a sophisticated power model for various base station (BS) types, which maps the RF output power radiated at the antenna elements to the total supply power of a BS site. We also consider an approach to quantify the energy efficiency of large geographical areas by using the existing small scale deployment models along with long term traffic models. Finally, the proposed evaluation framework is applied to quantify the energy efficiency of the downlink of a 3GPP LTE radio access network.