On the Deployment Opportunities for Increasing Energy Efficiency in LTE-Advanced with Relay Nodes

The escalated growth of rapid and high volume communication of information is accompanied with various granular and distributed network architecture based on relaying techniques. The deployment issues of relay nodes in future cellular networks, e.g. LTE-A, are raised and investigated in this paper from energy efficiency perspective in two different levels: link level and system level. The link level study, coupled with a simple power model, gives preliminary insight of how the relay nodes’ position influence the overall energy efficiency. Then, a realistic relay power model based suitable for LTE-A systems is introduced. Finally, based on the realistic relay power model, different deployment options are exploited in various traffic scenarios for LTE-A system and energy efficient deployment suggestions are given