Base station battery discharge

Abstract: Cellular base stations (BSs) are equipped with backup batteries to obtain the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and maintain the power supply reliability. While maintaining the reliability, the backup batteries of 5G BSs have some spare capacity over time due to the traffic-sensitive characteristic of 5G BS electricity load.

The equipment in base stations is usually supported by the utility grid, where the battery group is installed as the backup power. In case that the utility grid interrupts, the battery discharges to support the communication switching equipment during the period of the power outage.

After using BatAlloc to allocate suitable numbers of battery groups for base stations, the average battery lifetime has achieved to 4.3 years, roughly 1.8 times longer than that of the original allocation. The results indicate that our framework can also better protect base station batteries and significantly pro-long their average lifetimes.

When a base station is equipped with multiple battery groups, the impact of activi-ties is actually shared by all these batteries. Then the impact on every single battery should be proportionally reduced. In practice, there may be other requirements that limit the number of battery groups being installed at a base sta-tion.

The original battery allocation result is largely skewed that over 65 percent base stations are equipped with only one battery group. Our framework considers both the base station situations and battery fea-tures, allocating 2 battery groups to most base stations and 3 or 4 battery groups to those with long-time power outages.

In this paper, we closely examine the base station features and backup battery features from a 1.5-year dataset of a major cellular service provider, including 4,206 base stations distributed across 8,400 square kilometers and more than 1.5 billion records on base stations and battery statuses.