Green Communications: Principles, Concepts and Practice

Chapter 5Energy-Efficient Base Stations

Alberto Conte

Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Centre de Villarceaux, Nozay, France

5.1 Introduction

With the explosion of mobile Internet applications and the subsequent exponential increase of wireless data traffic, the energy consumption of cellular networks has rapidly caught the attention of the entire telecommunication community: industrials, operators, academics and government institutions. One of the first actions taken has been to monitor and understand where and by which cellular equipments the energy is consumed. Several studies have been conducted in parallel (e.g. [1–3]), and while the figures may slightly differs, all come to the same conclusion: whatever the technology is used (UMTS, HSPA and LTE), the major part of the energy (∼50–60%) of a mobile network is consumed by the radio access network (RAN), and in particular by the set of base stations, followed by the core network (∼30%), and data centres (∼10%). The impact of the base stations comes from the combination of the power consumption of the equipment itself (up to 1500 W for a nowadays macro base station) multiplied by the number of deployed sites in a commercial network (e.g. more than 12000 in the United Kingdom for a single operator [3]). In order to effectively improve the energy efficiency of the future mobile networks, it is thus important to focus the attention on the base station. This chapter aims a providing a survey on the base stations functions and architectures, ...