Integrating energy efficiency analysis of massive MIMO-based C-RAN

Besides the prior study of energy efficiency (EE) that focuses on single component (antenna, radio frequency (RF) chain, circuit, etc.), or limited to one base station (BS) area, in this paper, EE is integrated, investigated with various components (antenna, RF chain, circuit, coverage area) considering in, based on an optimized system model. That is, one optimized multi-BS system model is introduced beforehand with the cloud radio access network (C-RAN) for easier deployment of the selecting/sleeping mechanism. In addition, the system EE is described by an optimization problem while taking more component factors into consideration. While solving, this integrated optimization problem in all time intervals of all BS areas is proved to be equal to an optimization problem of each single BS area within each single time interval. After that, the integrated optimization solution is obtained while adding up the single-BS-single-interval optimization solutions, whereas the later solution is addressed by an offline decision method plus a convex optimization strategy. Observation from the numerical results demonstrates that the antenna power consumption is the dominant factor of the power consumption, which therefore, the dominant factor of EE performance.