Energy Savings in Heterogeneous Networks with Self-Organizing Backhauling

Abstract

Heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployment of a large number of low-power small base stations (SBS) is expected to meet up coverage and capacity challenges arising from the global upsurge of mobile data traffic volumes, driven mostly by increase of data-intensive devices, such as smartphones and tablets. However, effective backhaul implementation for the SBS still remains the main bottleneck, as the ever-increasing SBS density will lead to a more complex backhauling and, as such, increased risk of raising capital, and operational and network energy costs. In this paper, the conventional microwave backhauls are compared with self-backhauling for typical dense and spare environments. A heterogeneous network backhaul-energy model is proposed and used to investigate the energy efficiency of the two systems. The impacts of network traffic load and small cells density on power consumption for both backhaul systems were investigated. Furthermore, we present a break-even power point and load threshold level for safe operating regions toward achieving optimum utilization of self-backhauling in a way for higher energy-efficient and sustainable networks compared to traditional homogeneous macro network deployments.