Energy Efficiency of Relay deployment in LTE-Advanced

Multi-hop relaying deployment are expected to offer coverage extension and throughput enhancement to fulfill the staggering increase in mobile broadband traffic, while reducing the total energy consumption in heterogeneous cellular networks, namely joint macro basestation-relay networks. This paper investigates the impact of relay deployment in long termevolution advanced (LTE-Advanced), as a substitute for the traditional high-power macro basestation, on the total operational power and embodied energy of joint macro basestation-relay networks, with different basestations and relay nodes deployments densities. All joint networks are assumed to have similar service level to that of a baseline macro-basestation only network. Results obtained show that joint macro basestation-relay networks are more energy efficient than the baseline network, with energy reduction gain up to 58% for medium relay deployment density of 12 relay nodes per macrocell.