Effects of joint macrocell and residential picocell deployment on the network energy efficiency

Rising energy costs and the recent international focus on climate change issues has resulted in a high interest in improving the energy efficiency in the telecommunications industry. In this paper the effects of a joint deployment of macrocells for area coverage and publicly accessible residential picocells on the total energy consumption of the network is investigated. The decreasing energy efficiency of today's macrocellular technologies with increasing user demand for high data rates is discussed. It is shown that a joint deployment of macro- and publicly accessible residential picocells can reduce the total energy consumption by up to 70% in an urban area with today's technology. Furthermore the impact of future technologies for both macro- and femtocells on the energy efficiency is investigated. It is shown that the benefits of a joint macro- and picocell deployment will increase further as both technologies mature, and will result in a significant reduction of the network energy consumption as the user demand for high data rates increases.