Energy Efficient 5G NR Street-Macro Deployment in a Dense Urban Scenario

• Main Authors: Frenger, Pal, Helmersson, Ke Wang
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; Base stations; Energy consumption; Long Term Evolution; Power demand; Telecommunication traffic; Urban areas
• ISSN: 2576-6813
• DOI: 10.1109/GLOBECOM38437.2019.9013130

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.