Analysis of Energy Consumption and QoS in Femtocell Heterogeneous Networks

Recently, energy efficiency is considered as a very important issue in modern wireless communication system. Maintaining QoS is also critical when trying to reduce power consumption. At the same time, the heterogeneous network has become an important technique for improving the performance of the communication system, as it is able to offer a higher capacity, greater coverage area, and system energy efficiency. This paper describes a combined cellular and femtocell heterogeneous architecture, analyses and evaluates the performances of the system power consumption and average transmission bandwidth along with the different femtocell implementations. The result shows that combining cellular communications with femtocells can significantly reduce the overall power consumption, depending on the uptake of femtocell usage. The power saving is mainly from a reduction in the base station's operational and embodied energy. Also, QoS remains high when the power consumption drops. The simulation results also suggest that the femtocell implementation rate should be limited to around 60%, from the consideration of power efficiency. Finally, indifference curves of power consumption and QoS indicate the optimal femtocell adoption schemes under different requirements.