Energy Efficiency and Performance in mobile networks deployments with femtocells

The new generations of cellular technologies and the current trend towards small cells or femtocells, will offer an improved spectral efficiency per area, but they also offer an opportunity to improve the energy efficiency, measured as the power consumption needed to provide a certain throughput in a given area. In this paper, two network performance indicators, aggregated throughput and energy efficiency, have been analyzed and compared in two network architectures; a traditional deployment based on outdoor macro base stations, for the provision of outdoor and indoor coverage, and a deployment where some of the indoor traffic is supported by femtocells. Performance simulations and energy calculations have shown that the introduction of a femtocell layer, complementing the macrocell layer is a great leap forward in system performance and energy efficiency, when compared with current indoor coverage based on outdoor macro and micro base stations. Additionally, this paper present a study on how much could be reduced the mobile network energy requirements of macrocell deployments in high density urban deployments, in low traffic conditions, based on the application of two Self Organizing Networks (SON) techniques for energy saving, selective disconnection and power reduction of eNodeBs and HeNBs.