Energy Efficient 5G NR Street-Macro Deployment in a Dense Urban Scenario
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Frenger, Pal; Helmersson, Ke Wang
- Source
- 2019 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2019 IEEE. :1-6 Dec, 2019
- Subject
- Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineering Profession
General Topics for Engineers
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Signal Processing and Analysis
Energy consumption
Antenna arrays
Base stations
Long Term Evolution
Telecommunication traffic
Power demand
Urban areas
- Language
- ISSN
- 2576-6813
In this paper we study the impact on radio network energy consumption, system capacity and end-user performance when deploying 5G NR street-macro cells in a dense urban area. The network energy consumption is a significant part of the operator OPEX [1], and here NR has a clear advantage over LTE thanks to the lean design of the physical layer enabling more efficient hardware sleep during times with low traffic [2]. To evaluate the energy performance advantage of 5G NR we perform system evaluations in a scenario based on a real network in a European capital city. First, we study a NR-only scenario where high-power NR "street-macro cells" are added to a network of above-rooftop NR macro cells. Secondly, we examine a network migration scenario where NR is added to an existing LTE deployment and we show that in a dense urban scenario with very high traffic the network energy consumption is decreased by introducing NR. In both scenarios the street-macro cells increase the total system capacity as well as the cell-edge user throughput performance significantly. When cell sleep functionality utilizing discontinuous transmission (DTX) is used these performance enhancements are achieved without increasing the total network energy consumption.