  How would a cellular network designed for maximal energy efficiency look
like? To answer this fundamental question, tools from stochastic geometry are
used in this paper to model future cellular networks and obtain a new lower
bound on the average uplink spectral efficiency. This enables us to formulate a
tractable uplink energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem and solve it
analytically with respect to the density of base stations (BSs), the transmit
power levels, the number of BS antennas and users per cell, and the pilot reuse
factor. The closed-form expressions obtained from this general EE maximization
framework provide valuable insights on the interplay between the optimization
variables, hardware characteristics, and propagation environment. Small cells
are proved to give high EE, but the EE improvement saturates quickly with the
BS density. Interestingly, the maximal EE is achieved by also equipping the BSs
with multiple antennas and operate in a "massive MIMO" fashion, where the array
gain from coherent detection mitigates interference and the multiplexing of
many users reduces the energy cost per user.
