Bit per Joule efficiency of cooperating base stations in cellular networks

Energy consumption is lately receiving increased interest, and research efforts to assess the energy efficiency of cellular communication networks are made. This paper addresses the tradeoffs between gains in cell throughput that can be expected from coordinated multi point transmission and reception technologies and the increased energy consumption that they induce in cellular base stations. We explicitly consider effective transmission rates, taking into account the additional pilot, control and feedback overhead required for CoMP schemes, and determine the bit per Joule efficiency of network models for common propagation parameters under varying network densities and cooperation cluster sizes.