Ultra-Dense Networks for 5G and Beyond

8Energy Efficiency Optimization for Dense Networks

Quang‐Doanh Vu¹, Markku Juntti¹, Een‐Kee Hong² and Le‐Nam Tran³

¹Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland

²College of Electronics and Information, Kyung Hee University, South Korea

³School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin, Ireland

8.1 Introduction

The two major challenges for future wireless networks are the ever‐growing data traffic and the increasing energy consumption [1]. Both are the natural result of the popularity of wireless communications. In particular, energy consumption in wireless networks needs to be satisfactorily dealt with for sustainable economic growth. A dense network paradigm is introduced in order to solve the problem of exponential growth of data demand in the communications industry [2]. Moreover, network densification is also expected to be the key architecture for future wireless networks where wireless connectivity is pervasive. By bringing base stations near to the end users, dense small cell deployment has the potential of using energy in an efficient manner, since the required transmit power for combating the path loss is reduced. However, dense small cell deployment has its own cost. Using more base stations (BSs) means that the large number of hardware elements may lead to a sharp increase in the circuit power consumption. Moreover, with full frequency reuse and the small cells being close together, the interference becomes complicated [3] ...