Impact of receiver interference cancellation techniques on the base station power consumption in MIMO systems with inter-cell interference

In this paper, we investigate the impact of receiver interference cancellation (IC) techniques on the base station (BS) downlink transmission power for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system with inter-cell interference. Besides the power amplifier module whose power consumption is determined by the required transmission power, we also consider the signal processing module when characterizing the total power consumption of the BS. Rather than specifying absolute values, we define the power consumption of the signal processing module as a proportion of the power consumption of the power amplifier module. We investigate the influence of both the signal processing module and receiver IC techniques on the total power consumption of the BS. Results show that besides receiver IC techniques, the power consumed at the signal processing module should not be overlooked when evaluating the BS total power consumption. Particularly, when the power consumption of the signal processing module becomes too dominant, it may contribute more to the increase of the BS total power consumption as compared to the additional power needed by the power amplifier module to combat inter-cell interference. Furthermore, any transmission power savings that are potentially obtained from receive diversity gain and receiver IC techniques may not be justified if the signal processing consumes too much power relative to that of the power amplifier.