1st IEEE International Symposium on Telecommunication Technologies

Energy Efficiency of LTE Macro Base Station

David Chieng3, Alvin Ting3, Abdulaziz M. Ghaleb3

Ayad Atiyah Abdulkafi1,3*, Tiong Sieh Kiong1,

Johnny Koh2
1

Wireless Communication Cluster,

MIMOS Berhad
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
{ht.chieng, kee.ting, abdulaziz.saleh}@mimos.my

Power Engineering Center, Center of System and Machine

Intelligence, Universiti Tenaga Nasional
Selangor, Malaysia
al.ayad@yahoo.com, siehkiong@uniten.edu.my

reassigning the users to various LTE BSs in order to decide if a

certain BS can be switched off or not [6].
However, the benefits of the network planning of green
communications in LTE are not sufficiently investigated in the
literature and are not specifically dedicated to LTE networks
[6]. Our recent work in [7] presents an analysis of parameters
that are affecting the cell coverage area of macrocell network
as well as the relationship between area power consumption,
transmission range and these parameters. Thus, this research
extends the energy efficiency analysis by studying the impact
of modulation and coding scheme MCS, channel bandwidth
BW and transmit power Ptx on energy efficiency and cell size
of LTE macro base station. The reminder of this paper is
organized as follows. Section II presents the system models.
The simulation setup and results are presented in Section III.
Finally, conclusion is drawn in Section IV.

Abstract The growing energy consumption in wireless networks

driven by dramatic increases in mobile users and network traffic,
are putting mobile operators under immense challenges towards
meeting the demands of both cost reduction and environment
conservation. The network Energy Efficiency (EE) considers not
only energy consumed by the base station (BS), but also the
capacity and coverage of the network. In this paper we study the
impact of modulation and coding schemes (MCS), bandwidth
(BW) size and transmitted power on the energy efficiency of a
LTE macro base station. Although it is very much expected that
higher transmission power results in lower EE, the difference
actually diminishes when cell size increases. At around 1200m it
is found that the EE are almost equal for all transmission power
considered. On the other hand, EE increases significantly as the
BW increases. Similar effect on EE is observed when MCS
changes from lower order to higher order scheme. In fact EE
becomes more sensitive to MCS change at higher bandwidth.

II.
Keywords-component; energy efficiency; LTE; macro base
staion; MCS ; cell size

I.

A. Propagation Model
In general, there are three different factors that cause the
deterioration of signal quality due to propagation namely path
loss, shadowing and multi path. A basic signal propagation
model capturing path loss as well as shadowing is formulated
as [8]
D
r
(1)
Prx K < Ptx
r
o

INTRODUCTION

The number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the

number of people on earth by the end of 2012 and by 2016
there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita. Mobile data traffic
will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 78
percent from 2011 to 2016 [1]. The growing energy
consumption in wireless networks driven by these dramatic
increases in mobile users and network traffic are putting mobile
operators under immense challenges towards meeting the
demands of both cost reduction and environment conservation.
[2]. Energy efficiency improvement is seen as a key to reduce
the operational costs and environmental impact. Energy
savings in the radio access network is largely achieved by
automatically adapting the network capacity to the real traffic
demand at a given time period [3]. An overview of some
promising approaches and methods for improving the energy
efficiency in cellular network is provided in [4]. In [5] a high
level overview of the possible energy efficiency improvement
methods in LTE is presented. It was shown that the main
problem of energy consumption in a radio base station of a
wireless access system is the energy scaling traffic load
problem [5]. Energy savings can be achieved by switching off
the base stations BSs with low load; this can be performed after
*Corresponding Author

978-1-4673-4786-0/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

SYSTEM MODELS

where Ptx, Prx, r, and denote transmit and receive power,

propagation distance, and path loss exponent, respectively. The
random variable is used to model slow fading effects and
commonly follows a log-normal distribution, i.e., the variable
10 log10 follows a normal distribution. The terms K and ro
denote parameters to further adapt the model. K is a unitless
constant that models the impact of base station and mobile
terminal antenna heights, carrier frequency, propagation
conditions, penetration loss due to transmission from outdoor
to indoor and the antenna pattern. The antenna pattern depends
on the mobiles location relative to the base station. While the
propagation model (1) is suitable for analytical assessment, we
employ propagation models presented in [9] for our simulation.
These more realistic models incorporate path loss dependency
on carrier frequency, line of sight (LOS) conditions as well as
shadowing deviations.

259

D. Energy Efficiency
Energy efficiency (EE), which is defined as the ratio of total
amount data delivered and the total power consumed
measured in bits per joule [11], is represented by:

B. Cell Coverage Area

The coverage of a cellular system is generally designed for
a given minimum received power Pmin at the cell boundary.
The Pmin, which is also known as the receiver sensitivity can
be written in closed-form for cell coverage area C as [8]:

2  2ab 2  ab
Q( a )  exp

Q
b2 b

EE
(2)

Total amount data delivered

Total power consumed

RT
PCT

(5)

Where PCT is the total power consumed and RT is the total data
rate which can be calculated using the modified Shannons
formula as [12].

where

Pmin  Prx ( R)

V <dB

, b

10 D log10 (e)

V <dB
RT

The receiver sensitivity Pmin is the minimum power received at

which a throughput requirement is fulfilled. The throughput
will be equal to or higher than 95% of the maximum
throughput for a specified reference measurement channel and
can be expressed as [3]

Pmin

kTB  NF  SINR  IM  Gd

(3)

III.

K SNR

(6)

SIMULATION SETUP AND RESULTS

In this section, the parameters that are affecting the cell size
and the energy efficiency of LTE macro BS are investigated.
The impact of these parameters on coverage and energy
efficiency is shown for different modulation and coding
schemes.
A. Simulation Setup
We assume a single LTE macro base station that covers a
hexagonal shaped area. The cell size is determined according
to minimum received power level constraints. The receiver
sensitivity is calculated based on sufficient SINR for the
specified modulation scheme to achieve a minimum
requirement of 95% coverage degree. The pathloss model and
simulation parameters follow that in 3GPP TR 36.814 [9],
which are given in Table I. The parameters are based on 3GPP
recommended urban macrocell model with a carrier frequency
of 2.6 GHz, antenna height of 25 m and user height of 1.5 m.
The 2.6 GHz spectrum band is used since this is the band
allocated to future LTE operators in Malaysia [14]. Effective
environment height (which is subtracted from the actual
antenna height for BS and User Equipment UE to find their
effective antenna heights) and standard deviation of shadow
fading are assumed to be equal to 1m and 4 dB respectively.
The proposed simulation model for evaluating the EE in LTE
macro BS is shown in Fig. 1

C. Power Models
In [10], the average power consumption of a base station is
modeled as a linear function of average radiated power which
is given by:

N sec N ant ( Ai Ptx  Bi )

SNR

where BW accounts for the system bandwidth efficiency of

LTE and SNR accounts for the SNR implementation efficiency
of LTE. It should be noted that LTE is performing less than
1.6~2 dB off from the Shannon capacity bound because the
SNR is not constant and changes with the geometry factor (Gfactor). It was shown that this impact can be accounted for
using the fudge factor, , multiplying the BW parameter. It is
worth mentioning that we use = 0.9 (BW. = 0.75) and SNR
= 1.0 for our simulation [13].

Where kTB represents the thermal noise level in a specified

noise bandwidth BW, where BW = NRB * 180 (kHz) in LTE.
NRB is the number of resource blocks (RB) and 180 kHz is the
bandwidth of one RB. NF is the prescribed maximum noise
figure for the receiver. SINR is the signal to interference plus
noise ratio requirement for the chosen modulation and coding
scheme (MCS). IM is the implementation margin and the Gd
represents the diversity gain [3]. The value of Gd depends on
the specific implementation and the propagation conditions and
3 dB is used as an example in this paper. Note that a=0; when
the target minimum received power equals the average power
at the cell boundary, Pmin =Prx(R); and Prx(R) is the received
power at the cell boundary due to path loss alone. G% is the
standard deviation of shadow fading [8].

Pci

K BW K BW log 2 (1 

(4)

Where Nsec and Nant denote the BSs number of sectors and the
number of antennas per sector, respectively. Pc and Ptx denote
the average total power per base station and the power fed to
the antenna, respectively. The coefficient Ai accounts for the
part of the power consumption that is proportional to the
transmitted power (e.g., radio frequency (RF) amplifier power
including feeder losses), while Bi denotes the power that is
consumed independent of the average transmit power (e.g.,
signal processing, site cooling, backhaul) [10].

260

TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Start
Define the simulation parameters
BW, Ptx, NF, SINR_ requirement)
Calculate the receiver sensitivity, Pmin,
by eq. (3) based on BW and MCS

Value
2.6 GHz

Macro propagation model

Urban macro (UMa) [8]

Penetration loss

20 dB

Macro antenna pattern

(horizontal)

Initiate the cell radius, r, for LTE macro

BS
Read the required link budget
parameters

U UU

Parameter
Carrier frequency

M
A M   min 12
M3dB

3dB=70 degrees, Am = 25dB

Thermal noise

-174dBm/Hz

Noise figure

9 dB

Shadowing standard
deviation

4 dB

Coverage degree, C

95%

Power consumption
parameters for macro BS

, Am

Ai= 21.45,
Bi= 354.44

Find the received signal power and the

coverage degree, C, by eq. (1, 2)

Yes

less than 17.5% for QPSK, 12.5% for 16QAM and 8% for
64QAM. These EVM values are designed to correspond to no
more than a 5% loss in average and cell-edge throughputs in
typical deployment scenarios. For a given modulation, the code
rate can be chosen depending on the radio link conditions a
lower code rate can be used in poor channel conditions and a
higher code rate in the case of high SINR

C >=95%
No

Set r= r-U; then compute the maximum

cell size for LTE macro BS

. An extra Implementation Margin (IM) is added to reflect the

difference in SINR requirement between theory and
practicable implementation. IM of 2.5 dB is assumed for all
QPSK modes, while 3 dB and 4 dB are generally expected for
16QAM and 64QAM respectively. SINR requirement can be
estimated by using the throughput vs. average SNR tables or
by using the Alpha-Shannon formula. However, the typical
assumptions for the SINR values for different modulation and
coding schemes that are used in our simulation assumptions
equal the ones in [3] which are summarized in Table II. Loworder modulation such as QPSK is more robust and can
tolerate higher levels of interference but provides a lower
transmission bit rate. High-order modulation (i.e. more bits per
modulated symbol, e.g. 64QAM) offers a higher bit rate but is
more prone to errors due to its higher sensitivity to
interference, noise and channel estimation errors; it is
therefore useful only when the SINR is sufficiently high. On
other hand, for a given modulation, the code rate can be
chosen depending on the radio link conditions: a lower code
rate can be used in poor channel conditions and a higher code
rate in the case of high SINR. For the downlink data
transmissions in LTE, the base station typically selects the
Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) depending on the
Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) feedback characteristics of
the UEs receiver. The UE reports the highest MCS that it can
decode with a BLER (Block Error Rate, computed on the
transport blocks) probability not exceeding 10% [3].

Find the power consumed by eq. (4)

Calculate achievable data rate by eq. (6)

Compute the EE based on eq. (5)

End

Fig.1. Flow chart of the proposed simulation model

Requirements for the demodulation error rate of the different

modulation and coding schemes will be defined in LTE
specifications. For instance, the Error Vector Magnitude
(EVM) (which is equivalent to an SNR loss) is required to be

261

TABLE II. DOWNLINK SINR REQUIREMENTS FOR LTE

2000
1800

Modulation

Code Rate

SINR (dB)

QPSK

1/8

-5.1

QPSK

1/5

-2.9

QPSK

1/4

-1.7

QPSK

1/3

-1

QPSK

1/2

QPSK

2/3

4.3

QPSK

3/4

5.5

400

QPSK

4/5

6.2

200

16-QAM

1/2

7.9

16-QAM

2/3

11.3

16-QAM

3/4

12.2

16-QAM

4/5

12.8

64-QAM

2/3

15.3

64-QAM

3/4

17.5

64-QAM

4/5

18.6

1600

Macro Cell Radius (m)

1400
1200
1000
800
600

0
-10

-6

-4

-2

2
4
6
8 10
SINR Requirment (dB)

12

14

16

18

20

Fig.2. SINR requirement versus macro cell radius with Ptx=46dBm and
BW=10MHz

The lowest rate QPSK can support a cell size up to 9km2 and
the maximum cell size within 16-QAM is about 1.9km2 while
the 64-QAM can only support a cell size less than 0.73km2
with its lowest rate.
b)

B. Simulation Results
a)

-8

Energy Efficiency of LTE Macro BS:

This section shows the impact of transmitted power, MCS

and BW on the EE of LTE macro BS. EE is decreased as the
transmission range increases. Increasing transmission power
always increases the cell coverage area (cell size) but not
necessarily EE. Fig. 4 shows the EE as a function of cell
radius of LTE macro BS for different transmission powers at
fixed BW and MCS.

LTE Macro BS Cell Size :

The cell radius of LTE macro BS is calculated to achieve

minimum coverage degree of 95% based on the required SINR
and the receiver sensitivity as well as MCS. Figure 2 shows
the LTE macro cell radius as function of the SINR
requirement. From Fig.2, we can observe that the larger the
SINR requirement the smaller is the cell radius. Furthermore
for a fixed transmission power and a certain channel
bandwidth, the cell coverage area decreases as the SINR
requirement increases. Thus these SINR requirements can be
used in the first phase of network to estimate the cell radius of
LTE macro BS. In addition, the required SINR depends on the
MCS where higher the MCS used, higher the required SINR
and vice versa. For instance, using QPSK will have a lower
required SINR than 16-QAM. Subsequently, the lower MCSs
can support wider coverage area than the higher MCSs i.e. the
cell size of LTE macro BS decreases as the MCS moves from
QPSK to the higher QAM. The relationship between the MCS
and cell size of LTE macro BS is shown in Fig. 3. It is clear
that for a fix transmitted power and certain BW, the cell size
of LTE macro BS decreases as the MCS transit from QPSK to
the higher QAM.

10
9
8

Macro Cell Size(km )

7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0

1
1/8

2
1/5

3
1/4

4
1/3

5
1/2

QPS K

6
2/3

7
3/4

8
4/5

9
1/2

10
2/3

11
3/4

16QAM

12
4/5

13
2/3

14
3/4

15
4/5

64QAM

Modulation and Coding Schemes

Fig. 3. MCS-cell size relationship with Ptx=46dBm and BW=10MHz

262

18000

14000
Ptx=43dBm
Ptx=46dBm
Ptx=49dBm

12000

BW=1.4MHz
BW=3MHz
BW=5MHz
BW=10MHz
BW=15MHz
BW=20MHz

16000
14000

10000
EE (Bits/Joule)

EE (Bits/Joule)

12000
8000

6000

10000
8000
6000

4000

4000
2000

0
200

2000

400

600

800
1000
1200
Macro Cell Radius (m)

1400

1600

1800

Fig. 4. EE vs. macro cell radius for different Ptx with BW=10MHz and
MCS : 1/3-QPSK

250

500

750

1000 1250 1500 1750

Macro Cell Radius (m)

2000

2250

2500

Fig. 5. EE vs. macro cell radius for different BW with Ptx=46dBm and MCS :
1/3-QPSK

It is obvious that when the transmission power increases,

the EE decreases because of increasing in the operational
power consumption while the cell size increases due to
increasing the received power. Therefore, maximum energy
efficiency is achieved by tuning the power according to the
rate or SINR requirements of the system. For example, at cell
radius of 288m and for a fixed MCS with 1/3-QPSK at 10
MHz, the energy efficiencies for LTE macro BS are 6137.5
bits/joule for transmission power of 49dBm and 9424.6
bits/joule for 46dBm while it is up to 12967 bits/joule with
43dBm transmission power. In other words for small radius
i.e.288m, around 3kbits/Joule drop is observed per 3dB
increase in transmit power increase. On the other hand, the
transmission ranges for LTE macro BS are 1761, 1484 and
1247 meters for transmission powers of 49, 46 and 43 dBm
respectively.

QPSK and between 650-950 bits/joule EE gain per MHz for

3/4 - 64QAM. In general, the selection of the appropriate MCS
is an operator-dependent issue. Different operator requirements
may lead to different MCS approach selection. However, the
value of the EE depends on the selected MCS as well as BW.
In LTE, different MCS are available which differ from each
other from data rate and error protection perspectives. The goal
of the optimization is to find the MCS that yields the highest
energy efficiency. Figure 5 illustrates the impact of bandwidth
allocation and MCS selection on the expected and achievable
energy efficiency in LTE macro BS. Besides, table III
summarizes the values of EE that can be achieved at cell edge
by selecting the various MCS for different bandwidths. Fig. 5
and table III show the importance of bandwidth and MCS
selection on energy efficiency.

Cell Edge EE (Bits/Joule)

Also, it can be noted that the effect of transmission power

variation on EE starts to decrease as cell radius increases and
the effect of different transmission powers on EE becomes
almost the same at cell radius around 1200 m. The energy
efficiency performance versus the cell radius for different
bandwidths is shown in Fig.5. Overall, it is shown that when
the transmit power of macro BS is fixed, increasing the
bandwidth helps improve the energy efficiency within the
same MCS and cell radius. This is because of using more
bandwidth is not only beneficial for enhancing the capacity of
the network but also improving the energy efficiency of the
wireless transmission. Furthermore, high-bandwidth can be
more energy-efficient than the low-bandwidth within the same
coverage area size because the high bandwidth can support
more resource blocks and more data rate can be achieved. For
instance, at cell radius of 288 m, the EE that can be achieved
at 20MHz is more than 16000 bits/joule while for 1.4MHz
bandwidth it is smaller than 2000 bits/joule under the same
transmitted power and MCS. Approximately between 7001000 bits/joule EE gain per MHz can be observed for 1/3-

12000
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
0
20

15

10

BW (MHz)

1.4

4/5-64QAM
3/4-64QAM
2/3-64QAM
4/5-16QAM
3/4-16QAM
2/3-16QAM
1/2-16QAM
4/5-QPSK
3/4-QPSK
MCS
2/3-QPSK
1/2-QPSK
1/3-QPSK
1/4-QPSK
1/5-QPSK
1/8-QPSK

Fig. 6. EE as a function of MCS and BW

263

TABLE III.CELL EDGE EE FOR DIFFERENT BWS AND MCSS

MCS

the selected MCS for different transmission powers and

bandwidths. For a fix transmitted power and certain BW, the
cell size of LTE macro BS decreases as the MCS transit from
QPSK to the higher QAM. Also, increasing the transmission
power further increases the cell size of LTE macro BS but on
the other side the energy efficiency will be degraded.
Moreover, it can be concluded that the adaptive modulation
and coding schemes can greatly assist to improve the energy
efficiency of LTE macro BS. Also, EE increases significantly
as the BW increases. Similar effect on EE is observed when
MCS changes from lower order to higher order scheme. In fact
EE becomes more sensitive to MCS change at higher
bandwidth.

Bandwidth (MHz)
1.4

10

15

20

1/8-QPSK

93.3

91

107

215

321

426

1/5- QPSK

93.3

102

170

339

510

681

1/4- QPSK

93.3

129

217

437

648

867.4

1/3- QPSK

93.3

150

248

498

750

998

1/2- QPSK

122

261

435

872

1312

1734

2/3- QPSK

177.6

381

637

1278

1910

2553.3

3/4- QPSK

213.5

455

762

1516

2307

3075

4/5- QPSK

236

506

838

1674

2535

3402

1/2-16QAM

294

630

1047

2115

3154

4251.5

2/3-16QAM

427.3

917

1531

3052

4588

6148

3/4-16QAM

467

995

1660

3361

5028

6673

4/5-16QAM

494.2

1058

1758

3550

5261

7006.3

2/3-64QAM

606.4

1300

2170

4320

6494

8694

3/4-64QAM

704.4

1521

2533

5047

7593

10113

4/5-64QAM

759

1619

2720

5416

8083

10815

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was partially supported by MIMOS Berhad.
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[4]

The potential improvements obtainable on energy

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IV.

CONCLUSION

[12]

In this paper, we investigated the energy efficiency EE of

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