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Energy Efficiency and Cell Coverage Area

Analysis for Macrocell Networks
Ayad Atiyah Abdulkafi, Sieh Kiong Tiong, Johnny Koh
Electrical Department, College of Engineering,
Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN), Malaysia
al.ayad@yahoo.com, siehkiong@uniten.edu.my
bS/rc/ The issues of energy efciency and environmental
protection are becoming critical issues for both fxed and
wireless network operators worldwide. For wireless network
operators, the challenge generally lies on providing maximum
energy efciency with largest possible coverage area. In this
paper we frst investigate the parameters affecting energy
efciency and the cell coverage area. We later analyze the
relationship between area power consumption and
transmission range (cell radius), transmission power,
frequency band, shadowing and the path-loss exponent. From
the analysis, optimal inter site distance that utilizing minimum
area power consumption can be obtained for diferent
percentage requirement of coverage area corresponding to
minimum transmit power that achieves this degree of coverage.
The optimal inter site distance is determined for macrocell
without the impact of shadowing to be equal about 1250m with
minimum area power consumption of 526 Wlkm
2
. With the
effect of shadowing, the optimal inter site distance and
minimum area power consumption are 1050 m and .
Wlkm
2
respectively.
Keywords-component; macrocel network; energy efficiency;
cel overge area.
I.
I
NTRODUCTION
Besides minimizing the environmental impact of the
industry which becomes an increasingly important item on
the global political agenda, cellular network operators are
striving to reduce the energy consumption of their networks
for economical reasons. The costs for running a network are
largely affected by the energy bill and significant savings in
capex and opex can be realized through reduced energy
needs. According to [1], about 57% of network energy is
consumed by the BSs (Base Stations). The explosive demand
for high data rate of mobile users has caused BSs to be the
dominant total energy consumer within the mobile cellula
networks. Due to this, most studies on energy effciency in
mobile cellula radio networks focus on the BS side. Existing
mobile and cellular wireless network architectures are
designed to provide large coverage areas, which ofen face
challenges in catering the expected throughput requirement
at the cell edge. This is mainly due to the increase in the
inter-cell interference, as well as to constraints on the
transmit power of the mobile devices [2]. In these
architectures, the locations of the macro BSs are carefully
chosen by network planning. BS settings are objectively
configured to maximize the coverage while controlling the
interference between BSs. Generally, the improvements can
be achieved via two approaches. The first approach is by
reducing the power consumption of BS (either by using more
power-efficient hardware or by using more advanced
978-1-4673-0260-9/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE 1
David Chieng, Alvin Ting
Wireless Communication Cluster, MIMOS Berhad,
Malaysia
{ht.chieng, kee.ting} @mimos.my
sofware to adapt power consumption to the trafic situation).
The second approach is by adopting intelligent network
deployment strategies by means of using small, low power
BSs since the later is able to signifcantly decrease the power
consumption compared to high power macro BSs due to
simple reason whereby BS closer to mobile users lowers the
required transmit power due to advantageous path loss
conditions [3].
In principle, gains achieved in one area are
complimentary to gains achieved in the other, i.e., if the
deployment is optimized with respect to a certain coverage,
additional energy saving might be realized through site
optimization. Interdependencies, however, do exist if site
optimization afects the link budget, for instance if the
receiver sensitivity , which is a target minimum received
power level below which performance becomes un
acceptable and it is denoted as P __ is lowered through
improved RF components. [4].
In [2], the energy eficiency of downlink of a two-tier
heterogeneous networks, i.e. a network of macrocell BSs
overlaid by randomly distributed picocell BSs is analyzed in
order to address the exponential increase in data trafic
driven by a new generation of wireless devices. The
evaluation performance of the two-tier networks in terms of
energy efficiency and fairness of resource allocation is
carried out using analytical expressions of success
probabilities for each tier when a disjoint set of subchannels.
In [3] a potential improvement of the aea power
consumption achievable with network layouts featuring
varying numbers of micro sites in addition to conventional
macro sites for given system performance tagets under full
load conditions is evaluated. They provide a framework to
optimize cellular network deployments with respect to the
average number of micro sites per macro cell as well as the
macro cell size. Anyway, the effect of fequency band,
different shadowing and the receiver sensitivity on the cell
coverage aea ae not considered. Most existing literatures
investigate deployment strategies with respect to spectral
efficiency, coverage, or outage probability without focusing
on all paameters that afecting the coverage. In this paper,
we focus on the paameters. In addition, we characterize a
network's power consumption in Watts per unit area for
given coverage requirements and optimize the BS cell radius
with respect to these factors. We also provide simple models
for overall energy consumption of a network. From the
analysis we found that optimal inter site distance that
achieves minimum area power consumption can be obtained
based on coverage degree and the corresponding minimum
transmit power that achieves this degree of coverage with
and without the impact of shadowing. With a 95% coverage
degree, the optimal inter site distance that achieves minimum
area power consumption is determined for macro BS with
12.4 GHz, a =4 and minimum receiver sensitivity of Pmin= -
70dBm, to be equal about I250m and the corresponding cell
radius 72I.7m with minimum area power consumption of
526 W/km
2
. For same paameters above and with standad
deviation of shadow fading of 4 dB, the optimal cell radius,
optimal inter site distance and llmmum area power
consumption ae 606.2 m, 1050 m and 778.7 Wlkm
2
respectively.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II describes the wireless network architecture, and
the power consumption module. The simulation results and
analysis ae presented in Section III, as well as an illustration
of the trade-off between network energy effciency and
optimal inter site distance selection with and without
shadowing is demonstrated. Finally, conclusions ae drawn
and the future work is described.
II. SYSTEM MODEL AND PERFORMANCE
METRICS
Cellular systems designed for a given average received
power Prx(R) at cell boundary. Cell coverage area dictates
the percentage of locations within the cell with Prx:: Pmin
In order to compute the cell coverage area under path
loss and shadowing, we consider a BS inside a circular cell
of a given radius R. The percentage of area within a cell
where the received power exceeds the minimum required
power P min is obtained by taking an incremental area dA at
radius r from the BS in the cell, as shown in Fig. 1 [5].
A. Propagation Model
Commonly, deterioration of signal quality due to
propagation is related to three diferent causes: path loss,
shadowing, and multi path. A basic signal propagation model
capturing path loss as well as shadowing is formulated as [5]
(1)
Where PIX' Pm r, and a denote transmit and receive
power, propagation distance, and path loss exponent,
respectively. The random vaiable q is used to model slow
fading efects and commonly follows a log-normal
distribution, i.e., the variablelO 10glO q follows a normal
distribution. can set to the free-space path gain at distance
ro assuming omnidirectional antennas. Where ro is typically
assumed to be 1-10 m indoors and 10-100 m outdoors.
Alternatively, also can be determined by measurement at
ro or optimized (alone or together with a) to minimize the
mean-square error (MSE) between the model and the
empirical measurements [4, 5]. The required transmit power
is calculated as a function of cell range for fixed coverage
requirement C, by using (1). Here, coverage is defined as
2
Fath|uxxaudxhaduwug
Fig. 1. Contours of constant received power
the max cell range Rmax where the user satisfies minimum
required power Pmin Neglecting the effect of shadowing and
with D =. R, the required transmit power of macro BS can
be written as:
(2)
Where Pmin denotes the receiver sensitivity and D is the inter
site distance.
The transmit power of each site is calculated based on a
cell coverage requirement for macrocell without shadowing
[4, 6]. Combined path loss and shadowing leads to outage
and amoeba-like cell shapes as shown in Fig.I. The standard
deviation of the shadowing varies with fequency, antenna
heights and the environment.
B. Cell Coverage Areas
The cell coverage aea C also known as the useful aea
can be defined as the fraction of cell aea where received
power is above a given level Pmin , and the closed-form for C
can be written as [5]

Q(
a
)
exp [2-
b
ab
] .
Q(2-
ab
)
Pmin -Prx(R) b
10 .U .loBl0
(
e)
Where U
- -

qB

qB
(3)
Note that a=O; when the taget minimum received power
equals the average power at the cell bounday, P min =PriR);
and PriR) = PIX !U . IOgIO - !U. a . IOgIO (Rro) is the
received power at the cell bounday (distance R from the BS)
due to path loss alone. ___ is the standad deviation of
shadow fading. The outage probability of the cell is defined
as the percentage of aea within the cell that does not meet its
mnimum power requirement P min; that is, P 0"'= p( P ri r) <
Pmin) =
l-
C [5].
According to (3), the coverage aea of a cell is a function
of receiver sensitivity Pmim carrier frequency f, transmitted
power P,x, path losses exponent a and shadowing standad
deviation '
!
_j- i.e. C=f(a,b)=f(PmimP
w a, '
!
_j)
= f(Pmim Ptx ,
/
a, '
!
_j)-
In this paper, the efect of each parameter on coverage can
be obtained by fixing the other parameters. Optimal cell
radius and the corresponding transmitted power that achieve
the required coverage with minimum power consumption is
investigated. Also the effect of carier frequency and the
receiver sensitivity on coverage is investigated.
L Power Models
Conventional macro sites are designed to provide larger
areas with a certain minimum coverage. A site's power
consumption thereby depends on the size of the covered area
as well as the degree of coverage required. The relation
between average radiated power PI
X
and a site's power
consumption is linearly modeled for macro sites by [6, 7]
Where ^;ec
and ^_ denote the macrocell's number of
sectors and the number of antennas per sector, respectively.
The coeficient Ama accounts for the power consumption that
scales with the average radiated power. The transmit power
independent power ofsets Bma is mainly impacted by the
power spent for signal processing [7]. Paameter Ama and Bma
are based on measurements and specs and can be found in [8-
10]. Using (4) the total area power consumption of the
macrocell network can be written as:

mu
(5) C
c
Where Pma is the average power consumed by macro sites.
Here Ac is the reference cell size and can be written as [3, 4]
A

v0
(6) C
Z
III. SIMULATION PROCEDURE AND RESULTS
In this section, the effecting factors on the coverage area
are investigated. The impact of these parameters on
coverage is shown for a certain cell area and for diferent
scenarios. First of all, the methods and procedures are
explained in detail and the relation between these factors is
3
studied and illustated with simulations. Then, we suggest a
simple approach to determine optimal cell radius of BS
based on the area power consumption with and without the
effect of shadowing.
A. Simulation Procedure
In this section the simulation procedure is described. We
assume a circula cell of a radius R which is ranged from 1 to
5000m need to be serviced. A BS covers a hexagonal shaped
area is considered to be located in the center of this circular
cell to determine the percentage coverage aea that the BS
can cover. In this work we focus our investigations on the
paameters that afecting the coverage aea i.e. the effect of
Ptx, P mim f, path loss and shadowing on the coverage aea. It
is worth to mention that carier frequency is adopted from [4,
10] and is calculated based on fee space path loss model
assuming the use of omnidirectional antenna. The aim is to
only investigate the effect of each paameter on the cell
coverage size. Directional antenna which provides higher
gain and capacity multiplication due to sectorization will be
addressed in the future.
Then the power consumption and the total aea power
consumption of a BS are demonstrated. Without shadowing,
the transmitted power for diferent inter site distance is
calculated using (2). With the efect of shadowing, the
minimum transmitted power is determined by specifying a
required coverage, a BS's cell radius and minimum power
requirement Pmin using (3) i.e. for a given inter site distance
and Pmim we increase the transmitted power until the
required degree of coverage is achieved. Power
consumption and area power consumption ae determned
based on (4) and (5), and then the optimal cell radius that
achieves the minimum power consumption for different
values of tansmitted power is calculated.
*
9
=
W
C
1

.5
W
c
<
9
=
c
9

=
| -
M
_ | |
0
~,_ | |
..1.*~@| |

-
_ |
90
|
_ _
_
___

___

___
|
____
,
80
| |
70
60
50
40
30
20
-a=4.4
|
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
Cell Reference Area (km )
Fig.2. Cell Coverage Area versus Cell Reference Area with P,= 43dBm,
Pmin = -120dBm, a=4dB andf2.4GHz
20
B. Simulation Results
a) Cell Coverage Area:
If the received power is more than the receiver
sensitivity then the cell coverage area C depends only on the
ratio O__. It is a little more confusion that for a fixed yd
the coverage aea increases as a increases, since a lager a
implies that received signal power falls off more quickly.
But recall that it has been set Pmin = Prx(R), so the faster
power fallof is already taken into account (i.e., it is needed
to transmit at much higher power with a = 4 than with a = 2
for this equality to hold). The reason coverage aea increases
with path loss exponent under this assumption is that, as a
increases, the transmit power must increase to satisfy Pmin =
Prx(R). This results in higher average power throughout the
cell, yielding a higher coverage area. However, if we fix the
transmitted power then for low path loss exponent, the
percentage coverage area is higher than those for larger path
loss exponent as shown in Fig. 2, the percentage of covered
area of a certain area decreases as path loss increases.
While the coverage area decreases as
P
__ increases this
is because a smaller
]
__ means less variation about the
mean path loss. Without shadowing we have 100% coverage
(since P __ " PrxCR)) and so we expect that, as
]
__ decreases
to zero, coverage area increases to 100%. Thus, shadowing
has a decisive efect on cell coverage area as depicted in
Fig. 3. Shadowing effect wiII investigated further in the later
sections. Each radio receiver can only detect and decode
signals with strength lager than its sensitivity. Since the
signal strength falls with distance, the coverage can be
calculated using the transmitter power, the path-loss model,
and the sensitivity of the receiver. Improving receiver
sensitivity increases the allowable path loss, therefore
increasing the cell coverage aea as iIIustrated in Fig. 4.
80

"
70

-z
"
60
c
<
*
'
_
' ' ' | |

V
y
: : : +
---,=4
... ,=8
,=12

1 ' ' | |
' ' | | |
..JlLLL
1 ' ' | | |

V
\
:

:
30 - -
:

Cell Reference Area (km

'
)
Fig. 3. Cell Coverage Area versus Cell Reference Area with P,x 43dBm,
Pmin =120dBm, a =4 andJ=2.4GHz
4

=

70

=
c
60

.z
" 50
c
<
=
40

30

a
20
10
0
0 4 8 10 12 14
Cell Reference Area (km')
-Pmin=-120dBm
-Pmin= 1 10dBm
-Pmin=100dBm
16 18 20
Fig. 4. Cell Coverage Area versus Cell Reference Area with P,x 43dBm,
Pmin = -120dBm, (=4, r=4 andf2.4GHz
For example, if the receiver sensitivity is Pmin = I 00
dBm, the coverage degree wiII be less than 60% of 2 K
cell area which would be a very low coverage value for an
operational cellular system. Considering the less stringent
received power requirement Pmin = I 10 dBm yields a much
more acceptable value for coverage area.
Fig. 5 shows the efect of the transmitted power on the
coverage area of a radio transmitter. It is obvious that the
covered area becomes lager when the transmitted power
increases, but it is known that increasing transmission power
may cause interference with neighbor cells. It should be
noted that the cell aea is calculated according to (6).
As the new generation network works on much higher
frequencies with corresponding greater signal attenuation
therefore the coverage area of the proposed network must be
redefined.
90

80
=

5
70

60
.z
"
c
< 50
=

c
=
40

30

20
10
0 8 10 12 14 16 18
Cell Reference Area (km
'
)
Fig. 5. Cell Coverage Area versus Cell Reference Area with
Pmin = -120dBm, (=4, a=4 andf2.4GHz
20
100
90
C
80
m

O
70

O
60
*
m

50

C
C

40

30
20
0

--'r=900!HHz

+ _
--r=1800!\ 'lz

___ .$_
_

_
. . .|. -r=2400I'lHz
* |
_ "
. . :. . . .: . . . ._.

g
. . . . .: . . . .: - - - - . .
\
%
%
:

* : g : : :
.
|
. ._

. . . . ._. . . . . . . .
@
. ..
|
. . . .
|
. . .
% ^_
@
g

___.___
_
________

______
_
____ | ____

_ .___
^
+ "
"

- - - - : : . .
.
, - - - ..,;.

- - - - - - - - - - - :
. . . .. . . . . .
|
. . . ._. .. . , . . . . . a
t
. . . .
|
. . . .

. . .
| |
"
*@
'._
. . .
_

_
' ,
|

g

1

10 12 14
Cell Rererence Area ,n(
Fig. 6. Cell Coverage Area versus Cell Reference Area with
Ptx= 43dBm, Imin =-120dBm, opJ=4, 0=4and opJ=4
20
However, path loss at these higher frequencies is larger,
thereby limiting range as well as coverage area as shown in
Fig. 6. It is clear that coverage area for higher fequency is
smaller than the coverage area for lower frequency. In other
word, at the higher carrier frequencies, the signal path loss
in wireless medium is stronger which requires either
transmission power or network density to be increased.
Furthermore, while additional cariers and extended
bandwidths lead to an easily predictable increase in energy
consumption, the effect of higher carrier fequency can be
predicted only when propagation modeling is accurate. From
above discussion, it is obvious that each paameter has its
own efect on coverage aea; and these efects change
according to the geographical area as well as environmental
conditions. Another factor afecting the coverage aea is the
antenna heights on both BS and user terminal. Coverage aea
is strongly afected by the location of the transmitter antenna
and its heights which is taken into account due to path loss
model. Anyway, some of these paameters can be optimized
by using hadware equipments developments or deploy
advanced sofware to enhance the coverage degree for a
certain aea.
b) Power Consumption and Optimal Cell Radius :
Since increasing cell sizes require increasing power for
fixed coverage, there exists a fundamental tradeof between
an increase of the covered aea and an increase in power
consumption. The transmitted power can be calculated
according to (1) to achieve the required degree of coverage
given in (3) and for simulative investigations, we employ the
propagation parameter values specified in [11] for urban
macrocell. Furthermore, we consider the values of and Pmin
from [9].
For a 95% coverage degree, the minimum transmitted
power that achieves minimum area power consumption is
considered. We also try to find the minimum transmit power
5
500
4500
4000
NS
3500
. 3000
=
c
2500
G
8
2000

=
- i500
4

i000
500

. -

Without Shadowing
( . | ~ | "With Shadowi ng

| _ ( . J .-| | . .

____ ___ ___ ._____ ___ ___ ___

| ( . l . | . i
250 500 150 i000 |250 |500 i150 2000 2250 2500
Inter Site Distance (m)
Fig.7. Relationship between Area Power consumption and Inter Site
Distance
80

0
10
G
.z
60

C
50
=
N
40
60
50
.

.
.
40
.
.

30
.
20
<.
500
-
i000

~
|500
2500
2000
Transmitted power in dBm
i0 0
Inter Site Distanc in meters
-z
- 10
=
c

60
O

O0
=
N
c 40
60
50
|
~

.
~

.
\
40
.
~1

30
20
(a) Without Shadowing
2500
500
Transmitted )ower in dUm
|0 0
Inter Site Distanc in meters
(b) With Shadowing
Fig.S. Area power consumption as a fnction of transmit power and
inter site distance
for a certain cell radius that achieves the required degree of
coverage and apply the latter in power consumption and
area power consumption formulas. The area power
consumption as a function of the transmit power and inter
site distance for macro BS is calculated with and without
shadowing effect as shown in Fig. 7. For both cases, there
exists an absolute cell radius R, which minimizes the area
power consumption of the network. Neglecting the impact of
shadowing, the optimal cell radius as well as optimal inter
site distance that achieve minimum area power consumption
are determined for macro BS with f2.4 GHz, = 4 and
minimum receiver sensitivity of P min= -70dBm, to be equal
about 721.7 m and the corresponding inter site distance
D= 250 m with minimum area power consumption of 526
W /
2
, while for same paameters above and with standard
deviation of shadow fading of 4 dB, the optimal cell radius,
optimal inter site distance and mInImum area power
consumption ae 606.2 m, 1050 m and 778.7 W/km
2
respectively.
In fact, there ae different values for the transmitted
power and inter site distance which minimize the total aea
power consumption of the network and according to the
required degree of coverage as well as environmental
conditions. Fig. 8 shows the area power consumption as a
function of transmit power and inter site distance with log
plot in order to express both very large and very small
values of area power consumption in a short form with and
without the impact of shadow fading. It can be shown that
there exists certain value for both transmit power and inter
site distance, which minimize the total area power
consumption of the network e.g. without the impact of
shadowing P,x=16.66W and D=1250m, while with
shadowing efect P,x=18.14W and D=1050m . In addition, it
is clear that the network without shadowing is more energy
eficient than the network with shadowing.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper we investigate the energy efficiency of
macrocell network and consider it as a key performance
indicator of a network. The paameters afecting the cell
coverage aea were investigated. Cell size and transmit
power of different scenarios were calculated according to
combined path loss and shadowing to achieve the required
coverage degree. Optimal transmit power and cell radius as
well as inter site distance that achieve minimum area power
consumption of the network with and without the impact of
shadowing were investigated. It is obvious that there is a
strongly infuence of shadowing on cell coverage aea,
energy efficiency and aea power consumption of macrocell
networks and it is expected that further improvements can be
achieved through optimization among macro, micro and pico
stations to form a heterogeneous network to find optimum
energy efficiency and reduce the efect of shadowing during
the optimization and for determining potentially good
network designs.
6
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was partially supported by MIMOS Berhad.
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