An Analysis of Spectral Efficiency and Energy Consumption Tradeoffs for Reconfigurable Devices in Heterogeneous Wireless Systems

The proliferation of wireless broadband network usage over the last decade has led to the development and deployment of multiple broadband wireless radio access technologies (RATs) such as EVDO, WiMAX, HSPA and LTE. To support the ever-increasing wireless traffic demand, researchers have worked on the concept of an integrated heterogeneous wireless environment that encompasses several of these RATs which makes the resource allocation process more efficient by assigning each user in the system to the best RAT/RATs. In this paper, for such an integrated heterogeneous wireless system, we show the possible gains in spectral efficiency at the cost of increased energy consumption for a balanced and an unbalanced heterogeneous wireless network deployment scenario. Our main result suggests that the gains are not as significant for balanced deployment scenario where the spectral efficiency increases by as much as 75% with a corresponding increase in energy consumption in the range [32.2%, 114.0%] based on the hardware choices. However, the unbalanced scenario experiences significant gain in spectral efficiency of up to 553.7% with a corresponding increase in energy consumption in the range [98.8%, 614.9%]. Keywords-heterogeneous wireless networks; reconfigurable radios; 4G wireless systems; cyberinfrastructure;