Improving Residential In-building Energy Performance for Multi-operator and Multi-standard Radio Access in Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS)

Abstract: Good signal in indoor environments has always been one of the mobile operator’s main challenges. The situation gets even more complex when dealing with new energy-efficient buildings that insulate the heat inside the building but at the same time causes higher losses from the macro base stations. In this scenario, indoor solutions are required to overcome this problem. Nowadays, there are two main indoor solutions: Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) and small cells. This thesis focuses on DAS solutions and investigates the power consumption difference between the two main architectures: Passive and Active/Hybrid DAS. The evaluation is made by measuring the power consumption of the active components and adding them to the already existing Base Station power consumptions models. Power consumption measurements were performed for four commercial bands: 900, 1800, 2100, 2600 MHz. Power consumption and system capacity trade-off between the passive and active DAS solutions is also presented. The capacity analysis is focused on LTE and applied to a real case study: Norra Tornen residential building. Final results show that up to 75% of the indoor power consumption can be saved when implementing an active DAS solution without affecting the service quality.