A clean slate radio network designed for maximum energy performance

Abstract

This paper presents a clean slate radio network solution, that has been designed with the aim to maximize energy performance. In traditional radio network designs, the energy cost for providing coverage (idle mode functionality) is totally dominating the network energy consumption. Here, a logical separation between idle mode functions and user plane data transmission and reception will be assumed. This allows us to meet the key challenge of reducing idle mode energy consumption in the network by designing for DTX and DRX also in the network nodes. The clean slate energy optimized system design targets this challenge with a new way of transmitting system information and performing initial system access. To illustrate the technology potential of the solution a simple system level evaluation is provided. It is shown that the gain of transmitting system information in a single frequency network (SFN) format is shown to be more than 4 dB at an inter site distance (ISD) of 10000 meters. Furthermore, with certain assumptions on future hardware it is estimated that the proposed concept can reduce area power consumption with up to 95% compared to a reference system of today.