Radio network energy performance of massive MIMO beamforming systems

This paper evaluates the technology potential of using massive MIMO beamforming as a tool to enhance energy performance of radio networks. The geometry, user bit rate, required inter site distance, area power, discontinuous transmission ratio, and relative power consumption during transmission is evaluated by means of system level simulations and the results are compared with a traditional three-sectorized deployment. The simulation results indicate that massive MIMO beamforming can reduce network area power consumption significantly; especially if the gains are taken into account in the network planning process by enabling a deployment with larger inter site distance compared to the reference three-sectorized deployment without massive MIMO antenna systems. As an example we note that 5 dB additional link budget achieved by the massive MIMO beamforming can be used to reduce network area power consumption with 50% if we design the network for a 10 Mbps cell edge user throughput target.