A Framework for Energy Efficiency Evaluation of LTE Network in Urban, Suburban and Rural Areas

Energy Efficiency (EE) of base stations (BSs) in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall environment effects and economic issues for wireless network operators. In this paper, we highly focus on the EE evaluation of LTE BSs. Then, the parameters that are affecting the EE and the coverage area of LTE BS in different scenarios are investigated. EE analysis has been done using few key performance indicators including coverage size (C), area power consumption (APC), energy efficiency and area energy efficiency (AEE). The network performance in term of EE for all the three urban, suburban and rural terrains are compared and assessed. The simulation results show that the LTE BSs have better AEE in urban environment with cell size less than 750 m. For cell radius more than 750 m and 1500 m, the LTE performance becomes better in suburban and rural environments respectively. Also, it is obvious that there is a strongly influence of traffic load on APC and AEE of LTE macrocell networks. For all the three environments, it has been shown that the AEE of LTE macro BS decreases with increasing the traffic load and this effect becomes the same at high loads while the APC decreases as traffic load decreases.