Power Consumption Analysis and Dimensioning of UMTS-LTE with Relays

In the perspective of Green ICT, the massive deployment of cellular mobile radio networks claims attentions to their energy efficiency to favor both the eco-sustainability and the economic aspects. In this paper, we investigate on the impact of radio planning on both the power consumption and the throughput of mobile networks. We perform the analysis for LTE systems to evaluate the optimal cell radius accounting for both the network sustainability and the radio coverage constraints. We considered and compare different deployment strategies including the adoption of relay stations and their dimensioning. Both power and non-power controlled cases are analyzed. We show that the planning of a cellular system can be optimized by selecting the cell radius achieving the minimum power consumption and by properly deploying relays in the cell area at a certain distance from the BS and with a target coverage. We also propose a methodology to evaluate the trade-off between requirements on power consumption and throughput-per-user in networks with relays.