Power consumption of 5G base stations in cities

This paper proposes two modified power consumption models that would accurately depict the power consumption for a 5G base station in a standalone network and a novel routing protocol for distributing the load on the base stations in the case of intercellular communication.

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

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.

This restricts the potential use of the power models, as their validity and accuracy remain unclear. Future work includes the further development of the power consumption models to form a unified evaluation framework that enables the quantification and optimization of energy consumption and energy efficiency of 5G networks.

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 .

To improve the energy eficiency of 5G networks, it is imperative to develop sophisticated models that accurately reflect the influence of base station (BS) attributes and operational conditions on energy usage.