Limiting power transmission of green cellular networks: Impact on coverage and capacity

Reducing power transmission is of primary importance in future green cellular networks. First of all, the induced reduction of the interference encourages the deployment of opportunistic radios in the same spectrum. Then, it directly implies a reduction of the energy consumption. At last, electric field radiations reduction mitigates the potential risks on health. From a technical point of view, power control is however likely to degrade network performance. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of power reduction on the coverage and the capacity of cellular networks. We establish closed form formulas of outage probability by taking into account shadowing, thermal noise and base stations (BS) transmitting power impacts. We quantify the transmitting power needed for different kinds of environments (urban, rural) and frequencies and we show that the transmitting power can be optimized according to networks characteristics without decreasing the quality of service. We show at last that increasing the BS density results in a reduction of the global power density in the network.