Energy Efficiency 

The contemporary 5G wireless networks offer high throughputs by increasing the bandwidth, network densification, and utilization of advanced transmission techniques. However, those techniques are associated either with deploying new Base Stations (BSs) or extending existing ones with additional hardware. This results in increased power consumption, which is further related to higher MNO costs, and carbon footprint. Energy costs for MNO can be as high as 10% of the total operational expenditure. It is also be noted that less than 20% of the energy is used to for information processing and movement in mobile networks. MNO could keep coverage cells on all the time (ensuring service availability) and then selectively wake up capacity cells (based on traffic). Note that the RAN capacity is engineered the handle peak loads (busy hours / busy day load in busy season). Even though the 5G-NR standard are more energy efficient (for example, energy consumption per unit of data watt/bit is much less for 5G than 4G) the overall power consumption of 5G base stations can be very high. Also, due to propagation characteristics, the new spectrum bands that are used to rollout 5G will require many more mobile sites. Energy efficiency of 5G networks is of high importance for the telecom industry. All these aspects sugests that 5G operators have a huge responsibility to deploy capabilities in their network to optimize energy consumption. From this perspective, energy efficiency (EE) is defined as a ratio between the average user throughput and average power consumption. Significant effort has been put in during the standardization phase of 5G New Radio (NR) by 3GPP to provide unified mechanisms aimed at providing MNOs with network energy savings (ES). Following the conclusions of the study on EE aspects in 3GPP standards, TSG SA#75 recommended initiating further follow-up studies on a range of energy efficiency control related issues for 5G networks including the following aspects:
  • definition and calculation of EE KPIs in 3GPP Systems
  • energy efficiency control in 3GPP Systems
  • coordinated energy saving inRANand other subsystem in3GPPSystems
  • power consumption reduction at the site level
  • energy efficiency in 3GPP systems with NFV
  • energy efficiency in Self-Organizing Networks (SON)