Energy efficiency analysis of the reference systems, areas of improvements and target breakdown

In order to quantify the energy savings in wireless networks, a holistic view of the power consumption of the entire system needs to be captured. This requires an appropriate energy efficiency evaluation framework. In this deliverable, we present the necessary enhancements over existing performance evaluation frameworks for the wireless networks. The main objective is to capture the factors affecting the energy efficiency at component, node and network level. The most important additions to the existing frameworks include: (1) a sophisticated power model for various BS types, that maps the RF output power radiated at the antenna elements to the total supply power necessary to operate the network; (2) 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; (3) a suitable set of metrics that allows quantifying the amount of energy savings capturing the most important trade-offs between energy savings and maintaining the system capacity, network coverage and quality of service parameters. After presenting the framework and necessary components of the framework, the proposed evaluation framework is applied to quantify the base station energy efficiency of 3GPP LTE. The overall promise of energy efficiency improvement is further investigated qualitatively for different possible areas of improvement in the system and some fundamental technology potential limits are also identified.