Energy Efficiency in the Phantom Cell enhanced Local Area architecture

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is presently standardizing Enhanced Local Area (eLA) small-cell heterogeneous architectures for inclusion in Long Term Evolution (LTE) Release 12 as a solution offering high data rate to user terminals (UEs) along with high system capacity through spatial reuse of spectrum. At the same time, Energy Efficiency (EE) is becoming an important metric in evaluating the next generation of small cell networks. In this paper, we focus on a particular eLA architecture proposed by DOCOMO, called the Phantom Cell architecture. We use results from stochastic geometry to compare the EE of the phantom cell architecture versus the baseline small cell network, defined as a conventional frequency division duplex (FDD) LTE pico-cell deployment that uses the same spectrum as the underlying macrocellular network.