Potential on energy saving in a modular base station

The paper introduces a potential in power consumption savings in a novel modular wireless base station, being the fundamental part of the concept SAfRAN (Scalable Architecture for Resource Adaptable Network). One aspect of the concept presented in this paper is the energy saving approach using plurality of radio resources from a system bandwidth and transmitting different radio resource subsets by two or more transmitters. Because solely base station resources required for transmission are activated, the base station consumes only as much power as it is necessary to serve actual traffic. We present simulation results of macro base stations based on various modular designs and investigate their potential impact on energy consumption in comparison to a monolithic base station. Beyond energy efficiency we had in mind requirements to provide coverage on the fly, performance on the fly and bandwidth on the fly. For this we combined clustering, scalability and floating coverage approach.