2013 IEEE WCNC Workshop on Future gReen End-to-End wireless Network
Massive MIMO or Small Cell Network: Who is
More Energy Efficient?
Wenjia Liu, Shengqian Han, Chenyang Yang
Beihang University, Beijing, China
Email: {liuwenjia, sqhan}@ee.buaa.edu.cn, cyyang@buaa.edu.cn
Abstract—Energy efficiency (EE) is becoming an important
design goal for wireless communication systems providing high
spectral efficiency (SE). Both massive multi-input multi-output
(MIMO) and small cell network (SCN) are expected to achieve
high EE for high throughput cellular networks, though using
different mechanisms. Massive MIMO improves EE by exploiting
a large array gain, while SCN improves EE by deploying a
large number of low-power base stations (BSs) to reduce the
propagation loss and increase the opportunity of BS sleep. In
this paper, we compare the EEs as well as the SEs of Massive
MIMO and SCN. For a fair comparison, we consider a multi-cell
network with the same user density, antenna density and average
cell-edge signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). Perfect channel information
is assumed, and three BS sleep strategies are considered. Our
analysis shows that the EE of SCN increases with the cell size
shrinking, and the achievable SEs of SCN and Massive MIMO
increase with the cell-edge SNR. When the number of cells is
large, SCN is always more energy efficient than Massive MIMO.
On the other hand, when the number of cells is small, Massive
MIMO achieves higher EE than SCN when the circuit power
consumptions of Massive MIMO are much lower than SCN.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Wireless communication systems have been being designed
toward high spectral efficiency (SE) to support the explosively
growing traffics. Among various advanced technologies for
improving the SE, the approaches to exploit spatial resources
have been explored extensively, e.g., frequency reuse and
spatial multiplexing.
Both small cell network (SCN) [1] and Massive multi-input
multi-output (MIMO) [2] have been recognized as promising
ways to provide high SE, which actually are two extreme
ways to use the spatial resources. SCN consists of densely
deployed low-cost and low-power base stations (BSs). With the
shrinking of the cell size, SCN benefits from the cell-splitting
gain. Massive MIMO employs a large number of antennas to
serve a much smaller number of users, which enjoys a high
array gain [3].
Except for improving the SE, both SCN and Massive
MIMO are expected to improve energy efficiency (EE), which
is becoming an important design goal for high throughput
networks [4]. SCN brings transmitters and receivers closer and
reduces the required transmit power to overcome path loss [1].
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (No. 61120106002), the National Basic Research Program of China
(No. 2012CB316003) and Beijing Samsung Telecom R&D Center.
978-1-4799-0110-4/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
Chengjun Sun
Beijing Samsung Telecom R&D Center, China
Email: chengjun.sun@samsung.com
Moreover, the resulting small cell size provides much more
opportunities of closing the BSs with low traffics for energy
saving. By contrast, Massive MIMO exploits giant antenna
arrays to achieve high array gain and high spatial multiplexing
gain. It can also reduce the transmit power to support a given
throughput.
Recently, the performance of SCN and Massive MIMO on
energy saving has drawn significant attention. The effects of
cell size shrinking on energy saving were investigated in [5],
where only transmit power consumption was considered. The
required transmit powers of SCN and Massive MIMO to
achieve the same SE requirement were compared in [6], where
only a single-user scenario was considered without inter-
cell interference (ICI) and multi-user interference (MUI). In
practical systems, the circuit power consumption cannot be
ignored, especially for cellular systems where the BS occupies
a large portion of the overall power consumption in the
network [7]. When the circuit power consumed at the BSs are
taken into account, it is still unclear whether SCN or Massive
MIMO will be more energy efficient, especially for the multi-
cell multi-user systems where both ICI and MUI exist.
In this paper, we compare the EEs as well as the achievable
SEs of SCN and Massive MIMO, toward the goal to reveal
how we should employ spatial resources to provide high SE
and high EE. For a fair comparison, we consider identical
number of users and identical number of antennas in the
same area of a multi-cell network, and the cell-edge signal-
to-noise-ratio (SNR) is equal. Note that pilot contamination
was identified as a bottleneck on improving performance of
Massive MIMO [3] and the training and signalling overhead
will reduce both the SE and EE of SCN. Nonetheless, as a first
attempt to compare the two different architectures, we assume
that perfect channel information is available at the BSs. We
consider three BS sleep strategies, and analyze the impact of
various levels of circuit power consumptions and cell sizes on
the performance of Massive MIMO and SCN.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II introduces the system model. The EEs of Massive MIMO
and SCN are analyzed in Section III. The SE-EE relationships
of the two systems are compared In Section IV through
simulations, and conclusion remarks are given in Section V.
24
 2013 IEEE WCNC Workshop on Future gReen End-to-End wireless Network

area within a cell that has received power above a given

minimum [8]. Under the assumptions of no random shadowing
and identical receiver noises, the same cell-edge SNR should
be ensured for the two systems with different cell sizes and
different number of antennas to obtain 100% cell coverage
area. Therefore, the maximal transmit power of the BS, Pmax ,
is set to ensure a given cell-edge SNR, which is defined as the
average receive SNR for a user located at the cell boundary
when the BS transmits with single antenna and with Pmax [8].

Fig. 1. Illustration of the system settings. The cluster includes seven macro-
cells, each including one macro-BS and seven small-BSs, i.e., L = 7, N = 7.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
B. Downlink Transmission
Consider that BSb serves Kb single antenna users with zero-
forcing beamforming (ZFBF). For Massive MIMO, Kb =
K ≪ M . For SCN, we assume that Kb ≤ Ms .3
Denote Hb = [α1,b h1,b · · · αKb ,b hKb ,b ] as the downlink
channel matrix from BSb to the Kb users it serves, where αk,b
and hk,b denote the large-scale fading gain and the small-scale
fading channel from BSb to the k-th user (denoted by MSk ),
respectively. Assume that perfect channel state information
(CSI) is available at the BSs. Then the ZFBF at BSb can be
computed as
√ √
Wb = [ p1,b g1,b · · · pKb ,b gKb ,b ], (1)

A. System Settings of Massive MIMO and SCN where gk,b = ḡk,b /∥ḡk,b ∥, ḡk,b denotes the k-th column vector
† †
of (HH b ) , pk,b is the power allocated to MSk , (·) denotes the
We consider a cellular network consisting of multiple non- H
Moore-Penrose inverse, (·) is the conjugate transpose, and
coordinated hexagonal cells. The cell and the BS in the ∥ · ∥ denotes the Euclidean norm.
Massive MIMO system are called macro-cell and macro-BS. The received signal of MSk can be expressed as
Each macro-BS is equipped with a large number of co-located √ ∑Nc
antennas, which is much larger than the number of users in yk = pk,b hH k,b gk,b sk +
H
j=1,j̸=b hk,j Wj sj +nk , (2)
its serving cell. The SCN system consists of a large number | {z }
Inter-cell interference
of small cells, each with a BS called small-BS.
In this paper, user density and antenna density are respec- where sk is the data symbol transmitted from BSb to MSk , sj
tively defined as the number of BS antennas and users per unit is the data symbol vector for all Kj users served by BSj , nk
area. To ensure an approximately identical user density and is the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with zero mean
antenna density in the two systems, we consider a reference and variance σ 2 , and Nc denotes the number of BSs in the
area as illustrated in Fig. 1, which is a cluster of seven macro- cluster. According to the system settings, Nc = L for Massive
cells. Denote L as the number of macro-cells in the cluster, MIMO, and Nc = LN for SCN.
then L = 7 in Fig. 1. To unify the model and analysis of With ZFBF and perfect CSI, the intra-cell MUI can be
Massive MIMO and SCN systems, we use N to denote the eliminated. Hence only ICI exists as shown in (2). The
number of BSs deployed in one macro-cell. When N = 1, signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of MSk can be
the system is Massive MIMO, and the macro-BS equipped obtained as
with M antennas serves K users in the macro-cell, where pk,b |hH
k,b gk,b |
2

M ≫ K [3]. When N > 1, the system is SCN, and each SINRk = . (3)
∑
Nc
small-BS is equipped with Ms antennas.1 Since we consider ∥hH
k,j Wj ∥ +σ
2 2
the same antenna density for the two systems, the total number j=1,j̸=b
of antennas of Massive MIMO and SCN in one macro-cell | {z }
Ik
should be the same, i.e., N Ms = M . For notational simplicity,
we assume that M is an integer multiple of Ms .2 III. EE A NALYSIS OF M ASSIVE MIMO AND SCN
We consider the same cell coverage of the two systems A. Problem Formulation
for a fair comparison, i.e., the same expected percentage of
The EE of the network is defined as the ratio of the total
1 The number of transmitted bits to the total energy consumption in
homogeneous SCN system is considered in this paper, where the
small-BSs are uniformly deployed to avoid coverage hole. the cluster. Let Rk,b denote the data rate of MSk supported
2 More general cases can be easily included by first setting M = ⌊ M ⌋
s N
and then randomly allocating the remaining M − Ms N antennas to the N 3 If the number of users closest to BS exceeds M , BS will select M
b s b s
small-BSs, where ⌊·⌋ is floor operator. nearest users and the other users will be served by their closest adjacent BSs.

25
 2013 IEEE WCNC Workshop on Future gReen End-to-End wireless Network

by BSb , and Pb denote the total power consumption of BSb .

Then the EE can be expressed as Nc ∑
∑ Kb
min pk,b (7a)
∑Nc ∑Kb {p1,b ,...,pKb ,b }
Rk,b Rsum (
b=1 k=1
)
EE = b=1
∑Nc
k=1
, , (4) pk,b |hH
k,b gk,b |
2
b=1 Pb
Psum
s.t. log2 1+ 0
= Rk,b , ∀k, ∀b
Ik + σ 2
where Rsum and Psum are the sum data rate of all users (7b)
and the overall power consumption at all BSs in the cluster, ∑
Kb

respectively. pk,b ≤ Pmax , ∀b (7c)

k=1
Based on the result in [7], the total power consumption at
BSb can be modeled as pk,b ≥ 0, ∀k, ∀b, (7d)

( ) where Ik is the ICI power defined in (3).

Pt,b Since there is no cooperation among the BSs, BSb has
Pb = λ + Pc,b , (5)
ρ no knowledge of Ik , which depends on the power allocation
results of the interfering BSs. The problem (7) is similar
where Pt,b , Pc,b and ρ denote the transmit power consumption, to a conventional multi-cell power allocation problem, which
circuit power consumption and power amplifier efficiency, can be solved by BS-wise iteration power allocation, and the
respectively, and λ reflects the impacts of cooling, DC-DC convergence of the iterations was proven in [10]. However,
and main supply. The values of these parameters depend on when the cell number is large, the iteration algorithm is not
the type of the BS [9]. applicable due to the prohibitive complexity. To circumvent
this problem, we consider two extreme cases when calculating
Switching the BSs with low traffic loads into sleep mode is
Ik in the following. The performance of practical systems will
an essential approach for saving energy in SCN. We consider
lie between these two extreme cases.
three BS sleep strategies, which will be introduced in detail
1) Average Maximal Interference Power: In this case, we
in next section.
assume that all interfering BSs transmit with Pmax regardless
Let Pca and Pci denote the circuit power consumed at the of the data rate requirements of the users. Since the precoding
RF chain of each antenna in active mode and sleep mode, vectors at each BS are independent of the interfering channels,
respectively [7]. Then, the circuit power consumption of BSb the average interference power experienced at MSk , which is
can be expressed as follows, served by BSb , can be obtained as
∑Nc ∑Kj
I¯k = E{ j=1,j̸ i=1 pi,j |hk,j gi,j | }
H 2
Pc,b = Nt (Pci + δb (Pca − Pci )) , (6) =b
∑Nc ∑Kj
= j=1,j̸=b i=1 pi,j gi,jH
E{hk,j hH k,j }gi,j
∑Nc ∑Kj (8)
where δb = sign (Pt,b ) denotes the operating modes of BSb , = j=1,j̸=b i=1 pi,j α(dk,j )∥gi,j ∥2
and sign (·) denotes the sign function. If BSb is in sleep mode, ∑Nc
= j=1,j̸ =b δj Pmax α(dk,j )
then Pt,b = 0 and δb equals to zero. If BSb is in active mode,
Pt,b > 0 and δb = 1. Nt is the number of antennas at BSb . If where dk,j is the distance between BSj and MSk , α(dk,j ) is
BSb is a macro-BS, Nt = M . If BSb is a small BS, Nt = Ms . the corresponding large-scale fading gain of MSk , and δj is
To provide a whole picture of the SE-EE relationship of defined in (6) denoting the operating mode of BSj .
Massive MIMO and SCN, we maximize the EE of each system By replacing Ik with I¯k , (7b) can be expressed as
0
for a given data rate requirement of each user. Let Rk,b denote ( )
the data rate requirement of MSk , which is served by BSb . pk,b |hHk,b gk,b |
2
0
0
log2 1 + ∑Nc = Rk,b . (9)
By setting Rk,b = Rk,b , it is not hard to see from (4) that δ P
j=1,j̸=b j max α(d k,j ) + σ 2
to maximize the EE is equivalent to minimize the overall
power consumption Psum , which includes both transmit power Then problem (7) can be solved independently at each BS. It
consumption and circuit power consumption. According to (6), is not hard to find the optimal power allocation at BSb as
the circuit power consumption depends on the operating modes (∑ )
Nc 2
of the BSs. For a given BS sleep strategy, the circuit power rk,b j=1,j̸=b δ j Pmax α(dk,j ) + σ
p∗k,b = , (10)
consumption will be a constant. Therefore, we only need to |hHk,b gk,b |
2
minimize the overall transmit power consumption.
0
Then, the problem that maximizes the EE by allocating where rk,b = 2Rk,b − 1.
transmit powers to multiple users under the data rate require- If the sum of the optimal powers allocated to all the Kb
ment of each user and the maximal transmit power constraint users exceeds the maximal transmit power of each BS, i.e.,
of each BS for a given BS sleep strategy can be formulated as they do not meet the constraints in (7c), an outage will occur.

26
 2013 IEEE WCNC Workshop on Future gReen End-to-End wireless Network

5
10
2) Instantaneous Minimal Interference Power: The above

Transmit Power (W)

average maximal interference power model assumes maximal
0
transmit power of the interfering BSs, which can be regarded 10

as the worst-case average ICI power. Next, we consider the Min Interference
case where all the BSs cooperatively allocate the powers based −5 Max Interference
10
1 2 3 4 5 6
on the instantaneous CSI of all the users in the cluster, which SE per user (bps/Hz)
corresponds to the best-case ICI power. 10
4

Circuit Power (W)

With (1) and (2), the constraints in (7b) can be equivalently Massive MIMO
expressed as 10
3 SCN N = 7
SCN N = 61
∑
Nc ∑
Kj SCN N = 150
pk,b |hH
k,b gk,b |
2
− rk,b pi,j |hH
k,j gi,j | = rk,b σ
2 2
10
2 SCN N = 300
1 2 3 4 5 6
j=1,j̸=b i=1 SE per user (bps/Hz)
(11)
for k =∑
1, . . . , Kb and b = 1, . . . , Nc . Fig. 2. Transmit power and circuit power versus the data rate requirement
Nc
The b=1 Kb linear constraints in (11) can be rewritten in per user with the cell-edge SNR of 10 dB.
a compact form as
Ap = b, (12)
where A, p and b are respectively defined as for all cells with various sizes unless otherwise specified. In
 the simulations, we consider a data rate requirement (i.e., SE

−rk,b |hk,j gi,j |
H 2
j≠ b, i ̸= k requirement) achievable if the outage probability is less than
[A]k+∑b−1 Kl ,i+∑j−1 Kl = 0, j = b, i ̸= k 10%. Without otherwise specified, the BS sleep strategy for
l=1 l=1 
 H the SCN is set as follows: the BSs are turned into sleep mode
|hk,b gk,b |2 j = b, i = k
when they have no users to serve.
[p]k+∑b−1 Kl = pk,b , and [b]k+∑b−1 Kl = rk,b σ 2 .
l=1 l=1 Since the propagation model depends on the cell size, both
By replacing the constraints in (7b) with (12), the joint the short-range and long-range models are considered in the
power allocation problem can be formulated as simulations. We define the transition distance as 10 m and
35 m respectively for SCN and Massive MIMO systems, after
∑
Nc ∑
Kb
min pk,b (13a) which the propagation model switches from the short-range
{p1,1 ...pK1 ,1 ,...,p1,Nc ...pKN ,Nc } model to the long-range model. For the short-range model,
c b=1 k=1
s.t. (12), (7c), (7d) (13b) the line-of-sight (LOS) channel exists with large probability
and the large-scale fading gain follows 38.5 + 20 log d in dB
This is a linear programming problem, which can be numer- [8], where d is the distance between the user and the BS. For
ically solved with efficient algorithms [11]. When the matrix the long-range model [12], the large-scale fading gain follows
A has full rank, then the problem (7) has the unique solution, 35.3+37.6 log d in dB for Massive MIMO, and follows 30.6+
p∗ = A−1 b. If p∗ does not satisfy the constraints (7c) and 36.7 log d in dB for SCN.
(7d), then the problem is infeasible and an outage occurs. The EEs of Massive MIMO and SCN largely depend on the
The solution of this problem maximizes the EE of the multi- circuit power consumption model, whose parameters depend
cell network under the data rate requirement of each user on the BS types, and change with the cell size. The power
and the maximal transmit power constraint of each BS for consumption parameters of four typical BSs in prevalent
a given BS sleep strategy, where the instantaneous ICI power cellular systems are summarized in [9], which are given in
is minimal. Table I. The four types of BSs have the coverage of 1000 m,
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS 250 m, 100 m and 30 m, respectively.
In this section, we evaluate the EEs of Massive MIMO and
A. EE comparison
SCN systems, when the same number of users in the same area
are served with identical antenna density and with identical Figure 2 shows the overall transmit power and circuit power
cell-edge SNR. of the BSs in Massive MIMO and SCN systems in the
In the simulations, 10 users are uniformly distributed in each centric macro cell.4 Due to the limit of acceptable outage
macro-cell with the radius of 1000 m. Overall 300 antennas probability and maximal transmit power, Massive MIMO and
are either all equipped at the macro-BS of a Massive MIMO SCN systems have different maximum achievable SEs. As
system or distributed over multiple small-BSs of the SCN expected, the required overall transmit power in maximal
systems. The network layout is shown in Fig. 1, where L = 7 interference case is larger than that in minimal interference
macro-cells are considered. The numbers of hexagonal small- case. The required transmit power in practical cases of in-
cells within each hexagonal macro-cell are respectively set as terference power will lie between these two extreme cases.
7, 61, 150 and 300, and the corresponding radiuses are 378 m,
128 m, 82 m, and 58 m. The cell-edge SNR is set to 10 dB 4 In this way the cell-edge effects will be removed.

27
 2013 IEEE WCNC Workshop on Future gReen End-to-End wireless Network

0 0
10 10
Massive MIMO
SCN N = 7
SCN N = 61
SCN N = 150
−1
SCN N = 300
−1
10 10
EE (bit/J/Hz)

EE (bit/J/Hz)
Massive MIMO
SCN N = 7
SCN N = 61
SCN N = 150
−2 −2 SCN N = 300
10 10

−3 −3
10 10
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
SE per user (bps/Hz) SE per user (bps/Hz)

Fig. 3. The EE versus the required SE per user. The cell-edge SNR is 10 dB. Fig. 4. The EE versus the required SE per user. The cell-edge SNR is 30 dB.

For conciseness, we only analyze the performance of Massive −2

10
MIMO and SCN in the minimal interference case in the sequel.
With the cell-edge SNR of 10 dB, the achievable SE of
Massive MIMO is higher than SCN, and the achievable SE of

SCN decreases as the number of cells increases. To achieve
the same SE, Massive MIMO needs more transmit power
than SCN and the transmit power of SCN decreases with cell
shrinking. This is because when the cell size reduces, the users
will be closer to the BS.
Although reducing cell size will reduce the array gain for
a given antenna density, Fig. 2 shows that the benefit of high
large-scale fading gain exceeds the loss of array gain, which
results in a lower transmit power for a smaller cell size. On
the other hand, when the cell number of SCN is small, e.g.
N = 7, nearly all BSs will be active. Hence, the circuit power
of SCN is close to that of Massive MIMO. When the cell
number of SCN is large, e.g. N = 300, most BSs will be
in sleep mode. Therefore, the circuit power of SCN is much
smaller than that of Massive MIMO and decreases as the cell
number increases.
Fig. 3 shows the EEs of Massive MIMO and SCN as a
function of the required SE per user. It is shown that the EE
of SCN to achieve the same SE requirement is much higher
than that of Massive MIMO. The gain increases as the cell
size reduces, because the transmit power is much lower than
the circuit power for SCN such that the EE is dominated by
the circuit power.
B. Impact of cell-edge SNR
By comparing Fig. 3 with Fig. 4, we can observe the impact
of the cell-edge SNR on the performance of Massive MIMO
and SCN. Similar relationship between the EEs of Massive
MIMO and SCN can be observed from the two figures. For
the SE, however, when the cell-edge SNR is 30 dB, SCN can
achieve higher SE than Massive MIMO. This can be explained
as follows. With high cell-edge SNR, the system operates in
an ICI-limited scenario. In SCN, the reduction of cell size
increases the number of sleep BSs and hence reduces the
number of interfering BSs, which leads to the improvement of
the SE. On the other hand, since the antenna density is given,
EE (bit/J/Hz)
Massive MIMO
N=7 UEthre=0
N=7 UEthre=1
N=7 UEthre=2
−3
10
1 2 3 4 5 6
SE per user (bps/Hz)
Fig. 5. The EE versus the required SE per user with different BS sleep
strategies.
reducing the cell size will decrease the array gain. Therefore,
the achievable SE decreases when the cell size is too small as
shown in Fig. 4.
C. Impact of BS sleep strategy
In Fig. 5, we analyze the impact of BS sleep strategies
on the EE and the SE. In particular, we consider that a BS
will turn into sleep mode when there are no users, one user,
and two users in its coverage, respectively, corresponding to
increasing values of the sleep threshold, where the SCN with
seven cells is considered. It can be observed that when the
sleep threshold is higher, more BSs will be in sleep mode and
the system will consume less circuit power. Since the users in
the cells covered by the sleep BSs will be served by adjacent
active BSs, the increased propagation distance leads to more
transmit power consumption. Because circuit power dominates
the total power consumption, the EE of SCN improves as
the sleep threshold increases. However, the increased transmit
power leads to lower achievable SE because of the maximal
transmit power constraint.
D. Impact of the power consumption parameters
All previous simulation results have shown that Massive
MIMO achieves a lower EE than SCN, where the power

28
 2013 IEEE WCNC Workshop on Future gReen End-to-End wireless Network
0
10
−1
10
EE (bit/J/Hz)
−2
10
−3
10
0 0.2 0.4 0.6
η
Fig. 6. The EE versus η for Massive MIMO with the SE per user of
1.5bps/Hz.
consumption parameters of Massive MIMO are identical to
the Macro BS currently deployed in cellular systems since
the Massive MIMO was set to have the same coverage as the
Macro BS. In Fig. 6, we show with what power consumption
parameters the Massive MIMO can achieve a comparable
EE to SCN. To this end, we adjust the power consumption
of Massive MIMO by using the “Piecewise Cubic Hermite
Interpolating Polynomial (PCHIP)” with different η, where
R
η = 1000 represents the relative cell size. The four different
cell radiuses in Table I correspond to four breakpoints of η,
i.e., η4 = 1, η3 = 0.25, η2 = 0.1, η1 = 0.03.
The interpolating function for parameter ρ can be ex-
pressed as
 R EFERENCES

ρ1 (η), η ∈ [η1 , η2 ]
ρ(η) = ρ2 (η), η ∈ [η2 , η3 ] (14)

 [2] J. Hoydis, S. ten Brink, and M. Debbah, “Massive MIMO: How many
ρ3 (η), η ∈ [η3 , η4 ]
where ρi (η), i = 1, 2, 3 are the corresponding Hermit cubic
interpolant. Other power consumption parameters in Table I
can be similarly obtained by the interpolating functions.
In the simulations above, the values of η of SCN with
7, 61, 150 and 300 cells are 0.378, 0.128, 0.082 and 0.058,
respectively. It can be seen that when the cell number of SCN
is small, e.g. N = 7, Massive MIMO can achieve a higher
EE than SCN when η is less than 0.25, which is smaller than
that of SCN with 7 small-cells. This indicates that to achieve
the same EE, Massive MIMO should be designed with lower
power consumption than SCN. However, when the cell number
of SCN is large, e.g. Nc > 61, the EE of Massive MIMO is
always lower than SCN regardless of the power parameters.
This is because SCN can enjoy more BS sleep opportunity to
save the circuit power consumption.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we compared the energy efficiencies (EEs)
of Massive MIMO and small cell network (SCN), given the
same user density, antenna density and cell-edge SNR. To this
end, we employed a unified model to analyze and optimize
the two systems. We formulated the optimization problem for
TABLE I
PARAMETERS FOR E NERGY C ONSUMPTION [9]
cell radius λ ρ Pca Pci
1000 m 1.25 0.388 20.7 W 10.9 W
250 m 1.15 0.285 14.4 W 5.4 W
100 m 1.21 0.08 2.1 W 0.8 W
Massive MIMO 30 m 1.21 0.052 1.5 W 0.4 W
SCN N = 7
SCN N = 61
SCN N = 150
SCN N = 300
power allocation to multiple users that maximizes the EE
under the constraint of data rate requirement of each user
and the constraint of the maximal transmit power of each
0.8 1
BS, where a best and worst case of interference power were
considered. With the optimal solution of the problem, we
analyzed the impacts of cell-edge SNR, BS sleep strategies and
circuit power consumption on their performance. Our results
showed that more transmit power is required by Massive
MIMO than SCN to achieve the same spectral efficiency
(SE) requirement. With typical circuit power consumption
parameters, the EE of SCN is larger than that of Massive
MIMO, because in SCN the BSs with low traffic loads can be
turned into sleep mode. The achievable SE increases with the
cell-edge SNR for both Massive MIMO and SCN. When the
BS sleep threshold becomes higher, SCN can achieve higher
EE but lower achievable SE. When the number of cells in SCN
is small, Massive MIMO can achieve higher EE than SCN only
with very low circuit power consumption. When the number
of cells in SCN is large, Massive MIMO is always less energy
efficient than SCN regardless of the power consumptions.
[1] J. Hoydis, M. Kobayashi, and M. Debbah, “Green small-cell networks,”
IEEE Vehicular Tech. Mag., vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 37–43, Mar. 2011.
antennas do we need?” in Proc. Allerton Conf., 2011.
[3] F. Rusek, D. Persson, B. K. Lau, E. G. Larsson, T. L. Marzetta,
O. Edfors, and F. Tufvesson, “Scaling up MIMO: Opportunities and
challenges with very large arrays,” IEEE Signal Process. Mag., 2012.
[4] G. Li, Z. Xu, C. Xiong, and C. Yang, “Energy-efficient wireless com-
munications: tutorial, survey, and open issues,” IEEE Wireless Commun.
Mag., vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 28–35, Dec. 2011.
[5] H. Leem, S. Y. Baek, and D. K. Sung, “The effects of cell size on
energy saving, system capacity, and per-energy capacity,” in Proc. IEEE
WCNC, 2010.
[6] E. Kurniawan and A. Goldsmith, “Optimizing cellular network architec-
tures to minimize energy consumption,” in Proc. IEEE ICC, 2012.
[7] G. Auer, V. Giannini, C. Desset, I. Godor, P. Skillermark, M. Olsson,
M. Imran, D. Sabella, M. Gonzalez, O. Blume, and A. Fehske, “How
much energy is needed to run a wireless network?” IEEE Wireless
Commun. Mag., vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 40–49, Oct. 2011.
[8] A. Goldsmith, Wireless Communications. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2005.
[9] M. A. Imran and P. Partners, “Energy efficiency analysis of the reference
systems, areas of improvements and target breakdown,” Tech. Rep.,
2011.
[10] R. Yates, “A framework for uplink power control in cellular radio
systems,” IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun., vol. 13, no. 7, pp. 1341–
1347, Sep. 1995.
[11] S. Boyd and L. Vandenberghe, Convex Optimization. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.
[12] TR 36.814 V1.2.0, “Further Advancements for E-UTRA Physical Layer
Aspects (Release 9),” 3rd Generation Partnership Project, Jun. 2009.
29