Energy-Spectral Efficiency Trade-off for a Massive SU-MIMO System with Transceiver Power Consumption

We consider a single user (SU) massive MIMO system with multiple antennas at the transmitter (base station) and a single antenna at the user terminal (UT). Taking transceiver power consumption into consideration, for a given spectral efficiency (SE) we maximize the energy efficiency (EE) as a function of the number of base station (BS) antennas $M$, resulting in a closed-form expression for the optimal SE-EE trade-off. It is observed that in contrast to the classical SE-EE trade-off (which considers only the radiated power), with transceiver power consumption taken into account, the EE increases with increasing SE when SE is sufficiently small. Further, for a fixed SE we analyze the impact of varying cell size (i.e., equivalently average channel gain $G_c$) on the optimal EE. We show the interesting result that for sufficiently small $G_c$, the optimal EE decreases as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{G_c})$ with decreasing $G_c$. Our analysis also reveals that for sufficiently small SE (or large $G_c$), the EE is insensitive to the power amplifier efficiency.