Energy-Efficient Combination of Small Cells and Multi-Antenna Under Separation Architecture

Splitting the control plane (C plane) and data plane (D plane) is a key feature of future cellular networks. This letter studies the energy-efficient deployment strategy to guarantee the coverage and throughput of functionality separated network. While previous works mostly focused on single-antenna networks, our focus is the performance and energy consumption of cellular networks with multi-antenna base stations (BSs). Instead of just optimizing the BS density, we jointly optimize the BS density, the number of antennas and spectrum allocation to minimize the network energy consumption (NEC). Efficient algorithms have been proposed to solve the non-convex problem.