Power consumption of 10 million 5G base stations

Do 5G base stations consume a lot of energy?

The energy consumption of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks is one of the major concerns of the telecom industry. However, there is not currently an accurate and tractable approach to evaluate 5G base stations' (BSs') power consumption.

Can 3GPP reduce base station energy consumption in 5G NR BS?

Aiming at minimizing the base station (BS) energy consumption under low and medium load scenarios, the 3GPP recently completed a Release 18 study on energy saving techniques for 5G NR BSs . A broad range of techniques was evaluated in terms of the obtained network energy saving (NES) gain and their impact to the user-perceived throughput (UPT).

Do base stations dominate the energy consumption of the radio access network?

Furthermore, the base stations dominate the energy consumption of the radio access network. Therefore, it is reasonable to focus on the power consumption of the base stations first, while other aspects such as virtualization of compute in the 5G core or the energy consumption of user equipment should be considered at a later stage.

Can machine learning predict energy consumption for 5g/4g radio base stations?

To further develop energy modelling methodology and attempt to answer the questions presented in the previous section, different machine learning algorithm’s ability to predict energy consumption is investigated for 5G/4G radio base stations.