Power consumption and packet delay relationship for heterogeneous wireless networks

Heterogeneous wireless networks can improve network capacity by deploying overlapping base stations in different tiers. The better capacity can reduce packet delay but a larger number of base stations may result in a higher power consumption. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous wireless cellular network that has multiple types of base stations with different transmission powers, signal-to-interference-ratio targets and deployment densities. This paper develops a method to determine the relationship between power consumption and packet delay. We calculate numerically the power consumptions and packet delays for various system configurations. Our results reveal that there is a trade-off between power consumption and packet delay. With the results, we may determine the minimum power consumption given a maximum packet delay requirement.