Power Consumption Assessment of Co-Located and Distributed Antenna Architectures

Mobile communication systems demand much higher data rates and increase with each generation, which may require significantly more power consumption compared with the current fourth-generation (4G) and fifth-generation (5G) systems. Base stations are characterized as the main supplier to the energy consumption of a mobile network. The intensifying energy costs and environmental concerns about the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction have already created an urgent need for more energy-efficient and low-power consumption base stations (BSs) in wireless communications. Hence, the power consumption topic is one of the most important issues for telecom network providers. Distributed antenna architecture could save network power consumption by reducing cell size or getting closer to the users. In this paper, we investigate the effects of cell size on power consumption in terms of co-located and distributed antenna architectures. The distributed antenna architecture shows reduced power consumption of about 35% compared to the conventional co-located architecture. Therefore, by replacing a co-located antenna with a distributed antenna, total power consumption could be decreased.