How to view the power generation of mobile base station communication

How do base stations affect mobile cellular network power consumption?

Base stations represent the main contributor to the energy consumption of a mobile cellular network. Since traffic load in mobile networks significantly varies during a working or weekend day, it is important to quantify the influence of these variations on the base station power consumption.

What is a base station power consumption model?

In recent years, many models for base station power con-sumption have been proposed in the literature. The work in proposed a widely used power consumption model, which explicitly shows the linear relationship between the power transmitted by the BS and its consumed power.

What are base station models?

The base station models vary in their approaches and potential use cases. Hereafter, the models are grouped according to these aspects. Main component models only model the power consumption of the main base station components (power amplifier, analog frontend, baseband unit, active cooling, power supply) separately.

Can a base station Power model be combined?

As the main components are common to most of the models, they can be easily combined to form a new model. Most of the base station power models are based on measurements of LTE (4G) hardware or theoretical assumptions. For the more recent models, based on measurements of 5G hardware, the parameter values are not publicly available.

Do base stations dominate the energy consumption of the radio access network?

Furthermore, the base stations dominate the energy consumption of the radio access network. Therefore, it is reasonable to focus on the power consumption of the base stations first, while other aspects such as virtualization of compute in the 5G core or the energy consumption of user equipment should be considered at a later stage.

How much power does a cellular base station use?

This problem exists particularly among the mobile telephony towers in rural areas, that lack quality grid power supply. A cellular base station can use anywhere from 1 to 5 kW power per hour depending upon the number of transceivers attached to the base station, the age of cell towers, and energy needed for air conditioning.