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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.
“A 5G base station is generally expected to consume roughly three times as much power as a 4G base station. And more 5G base stations are needed to cover the same area,” -IEEE Spectrum, 5G's Waveform Is a Battery Vampire
A report from GSMA about 5G network cost suggests up to 140% more energy consumption than 4G . Energy saving measures in MNOs are needs rather than nice-to-have. What is more important is that sustainability has risen to the top of the agenda for many industries, including telecoms.
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 power consumption of a single 5G station is 2.5 to 3.5 times higher than that of a single 4G station. The main factor behind this increase in 5G power consumption is the high power usage of the active antenna unit (AAU). Under a full workload, a single station uses nearly 3700W.
Although the absolute value of the power consumption of 5G base stations is increasing, their energy efficiency ratio is much lower than that of 4G stations. In other words, with the same power consumption, the network capacity of 5G will be as dozens of times larger than 4G, so the power consumption per bit is sharply reduced.
The explosive growth of mobile data traffic has resulted in a significant increase in the energy consumption of 5G base stations (BSs).
However, this technological leap comes with a substantial increase in energy consumption. Compared to its predecessor, the fourth-generation (4G) network, the energy consumption of the 5G network is approximately three times higher .