The energy efficiency of LTE/LTE-advanced femto/small cell networks

Rapid growth in provisioning of cellular data at low or same energy expenditure is one of the most significant objectives of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) division. The exponential growth of cellular data traffic affects not only the capacity requirements of the cellular networks, but also affects the quality of service. In order to fulfill the increasing demands in cellular communications, femtocells have been proposed as a user based solution in LTE networks. This paper aims to investigate the impact of femtocells deployment on the energy efficiency of LTE/LTE-Advanced networks. The investigation focuses on the energy related issues in the LTE/LTE-Advanced networks and the effectiveness of femtocells in overall energy consumption and throughput. A detailed analysis is carried out on femtocells as an effective solution to save energy, offloading traffic from macrocell and reduce the expenditures of cellular networks.