Abstract:
Phantom cellular networks are the key enabling technology that can increase
the capacity of cellular networks by adding a new data plane to an exist ing macrocell control plane. Deployment of conventional two-tier phantom
cellular networks results in an increase in overall power consumption of cel lular systems. In this work, we evaluate the performance of sustainable
phantom cellular networks to reduce the overall power consumption. The
Phantom Base Stations (PBSs) are enabled with Energy Harvesting (EH)
from renewable energy resources. Addition of Phantom cells in the network
provides with a capacity gain of 1.25 times over the conventional macro cel lular network. This gain can be further enhanced by up to 2.6 times by
using interference free PBSs (mitigating interference). Moreover, this work
presents a performance comparison of Round Robin (RR) and Proportional
Fairness (PF) in terms of capacity and energy efficiency (EE). The perfor mance of Energy Harvesting (EH) enabled phantom cells operating under a
macrocell is analyzed in terms of capacity and energy efficiency. The Phan tom Base Stations (PBSs) provide capacity gains by offloading users from
Macro Base Station (MBS). However, due to the reuse of the same resource
blocks by all PBSs, severe co-channel interference exists between PBSs, which
limits the capacity gains. Furthermore, an excessive amount of energy is con sumed by the PBSs to overcome this co-channel interference. To minimize
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the above mentioned capacity limiting problem of co-channel interference
and energy consumption, semi-static ON/OFF switching schemes are evalu ated. Interference Aware (IA),Traffic Aware (TA) and capacity Maximising
(CMS) ON/OFF switching schemes are compared with Random ON/OFF
and macrocell only schemes. Simulation results show that when the num bers of offloaded users are high, the CMS scheme performs better in terms of
capacity, with energy savings upto 64%. For both the IA and TA switching
schemes, the gains are dependent on user distribution within the network
and independent for CMS scheme. Finally, the use of renewable energy to
power PBS can reduce carbon CO2 emission and will make our environment
clean
