Mobile Network Offloading: Deployment and Energy Aspects

The mobile data traffic growth and the high fraction of indoor-generated traffic push mobile operators to devise new deployment strategies such as mobile network offloading. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the energy consumption and the deployment cost, based on the demanded traffic level, for a joint macro-femtocell network which enables mobile network offloading in Helsinki Metropolitan Area by 2015. This deployment is compared to an optimized only macro cellular network. The study tries to resolve under what conditions, in terms of demanded traffic, deployment cost and energy consumption, a mobile operator should deploy femtocells. Assuming that only the new network infrastructure is installed by 2015, the results show that wide-to-local area offloading is beneficial for a mobile operator to handle the mobile data traffic growth, reduce the deployment costs and the energy consumption of the radio access network.