Energy Efficient Beamforming in Heterogeneous Small Cell Networks

Abstract

The densification of wireless networks via small cells is an effective way to improve spectral efficiency but, on the other hand, also causes an increase of power consumption. In this paper, we consider the energy efficient beamforming design for a heterogeneous small cell network, where a number of multi-antenna small base stations (SBSs) share the spectrum resource of a macro base station (MBS). The design goal is to improve the energy efficiency of the whole network and meanwhile provide quality-of-service (QoS) protection for macro cell communications, which generally have higher priorities. We propose a novel efficient method to address the formulated non-convex energy efficient beamforming design problem. Simulation results show that the proposed beamforming design can dramatically enhance the energy efficiency of the whole network.