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That's almost a threefold increase compared to 4G (5). One 5G base station is estimated to consume about as much power as 73 households (6), and 3x as much as the previous generation of base stations (5), (7).
This technical report explores how network energy saving technologies that have emerged since the 4G era, such as carrier shutdown, channel shutdown, symbol shutdown etc., can be leveraged to mitigate 5G energy consumption.
The Small Cell Forum predicts the installed base of small cells to reach 70.2 million in 2025 and the total installed base of 5G or multimode small cells in 2025 to be 13.1 million. “A 5G base station is generally expected to consume roughly three times as much power as a 4G base station.
It also analyses how enhanced technologies like deep sleep, symbol aggregation shutdown etc., have been developing in the 5G era. This report aims to detail these fundamentals. However, it is far away from being enough, a revolutionized energy saving solution should be taken into consideration.
The Green Base Station which is introduced is equipped with the regenerative energy sources wind power and photo-voltaic energy to reduce the power consumption taken out of the public grid to a minimum, whenever sunlight or wind is present.
In a wireless communications network, the base station should maintain high-quality coverage. It should also have the potential for upgrade or evolution. As network traffic increases, power consumption increases proportionally to the number of base stations. However, reducing the number of base stations may degrade network quality.
Only a small backup battery is used during the start-up time of the fuel cell. Thus, the amount of lead is reduced to a minimum in the Green Base Station. Depending on the system configuration, it is even possible to completely avoid the usage of lead acid batteries.
In a base station, the number of carriers is usually configured according to peak hour traffic. As a result, in idle hours, the power of some carriers is used in control channels rather than in traffic channels, leading to very low power utilization.