Energy-efficient 5G deployment in rural areas

Energy efficiency is of profound importance for prospective 5G wireless networks, especially in sparsely populated rural areas where broadband mobile services should be provided at a reasonable cost. In this paper the impact of beamforming (BF) and cell discontinuous transmission (cell DTX) technologies on the average area power consumption is studied. The required density of base stations for a 5G cellular system in a rural environment is also investigated. For this purpose, we propose a simple rural area model that captures a non-uniform distribution of users and employ the generalized Lloyd algorithm to determine the deployment of base stations. We assume a 5G system operating in mmWave band centered at 28 GHz with the bandwidth of 100 MHz, compared with existing LTE networks at 0.8 GHz with a 20 MHz bandwidth. Simulation results show that for the 5G network the density of base stations needed to provide 50 Mbps for 95% of users at the busy hour will be reduced by 8-9 times with the implementation of BF. It is also observed that BF has a greater effect on the energy saving of 5G networks in rural areas in comparison to the cell DTX.