Power consumption modeling of femto-assisted cellular networks using Renewal Reward Process

The demand for bandwidth in cellular networks is ever increasing and most of it originates from indoor users. Femtocells are low-power, low-cost home base stations that can be deployed by end users in homes/offices to satisfy this need without incurring significant deployment and running costs. Widespread deployment of femtocells appear a potential reality in near future, and hence, it is of interest to study its energy saving measures. One promising energy efficiency technique is the introduction of sleep mode on femtocells, allowing them to switch off their radio and associated processing when there are no active devices within their range. In this paper, we model sleep-mode behavior in femtocells using Renewal-Reward-Process and determine the lower bound on power consumption that can be achieved. Power consumption for user equipments and macrocell base station are also modeled to evaluate overall network power consumption. The analytical model is verified through extensive simulation.