On the energy efficiency gain of MIMO communication under various power consumption models

Along with spectral efficiency (SE), Energy efficiency (EE) is becoming one of the main performance evaluation criteria in communication. These two criteria, which are conflicting, can be linked through their trade-off. As far as MIMO is concerned, a closed-form approximation of the EE-SE trade-off has recently been proposed and it proved useful for analyzing the impact of using multiple antennas on the EE. In this paper, we use this closed-form approximation for assessing and comparing the EE gain of MIMO over SISO system when different power consumption models (PCMs) are considered at the transmitter. The EE of a communication system is closely related to its power consumption. In theory only the transmit power is considered as consumed power, whereas in a practical setting, the consumed power is the addition of two terms; the fixed consumed power, which accounts for cooling, processing, etc., and the variable consumed power, which varies as a function of the transmit power. Our analysis unveils the large mismatch between theoretical and practical EE gain of MIMO over SISO system; In theory, the EE gain increases both with the SE and the number of antennas, and, hence the potential of MIMO for EE improvement is very large in comparison with SISO; On the contrary, the EE gain is small and decreases as the number of transmit antennas increases when realistic PCMs are considered.