Green Communications: Principles, Concepts and Practice

Chapter 8Energy-Efficient Operation and Management for Mobile Networks

Zhisheng Niu and Sheng Zhou

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

8.1 Principles

8.1.1 NM Should Be in a Holistic Manner

The continuously growing demands for ubiquitous and broadband access to the Internet brings the explosive development of information and communication technology (ICT) industry, which has become one of the major sources (responsible for 2–10%) of worldwide energy consumption and is expected to increase further in the future. In the meantime, we have witnessed a consistent increase in the number of mobile terminals, especially in the coming era of Internet of Things, which has triggered more complex and higher energy-consumed signal processing technologies. According to the portfolio analysis of the total energy consumption in a typical mobile network¹, it is reported that nearly 75% comes from the base station (BS) side and, inside a BS, nearly 70% of energy is consumed by baseband processing, power amplifiers, and air conditioners in order to keep the BS working (i.e., providing the coverage) even though there is no any traffic in the cell. Therefore, only through the reduction of transmitting power does not help too much for the total energy savings, and so are the incremental approaches such as slim base stations or smart cooling technologies. A more ambitious and system-wide solution is expected if some lightly loaded BSs can be turned into sleep ...