How does mobile data traffic affect the energy consumption of 5G base stations?

The explosive growth of mobile data traffic has resulted in a significant increase in the energy consumption of 5G base stations (BSs).

What is the impact of base stations?

The impact of the Base Stations comes from the combination of the power consumption of the equipment itself (up to 1500 Watts for a nowadays macro base station) multiplied by the number of deployed sites in a commercial network (e.g. more than 12000 in UK for a single operator).

What is 5G base station?

1. Introduction 5G base station (BS), as an important electrical load, has been growing rapidly in the number and density to cope with the exponential growth of mobile data traffic . It is predicted that by 2025, there will be about 13.1 million BSs in the world, and the BS energy consumption will reach 200 billion kWh .

Does BS reduce energy consumption?

The communication traffic of BSs changes over time, and it assumed that the load time interval and the time-of-use electricity price are fixed, therefore, the minimization of the BS power consumption leads to the minimization of energy consumption, which further minimizes the electricity cost.

How do you calculate the power consumption of a BS?

Therefore, the total power consumption of all BSs at time t, P B S, a l l t, is expressed as follows: (3) P B S, a l l t = ∑ i = 0 M s i t × [a i + b i × T i t] + (1 s i t) × P s l e e p, i Generally, UEs will be interfered by other BSs and accompanied by noise interference when receiving useful signals.

Does user association reduce system energy consumption?

In addition, users (UEs) within the coverage of the sleep BSs need to be associated with other BSs to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) of UEs. Therefore, it is of great significance to incorporate reasonable user association into the BS sleep mechanism to reduce system energy consumption. Extensive research has been conducted in this domain.