Power consumption of different communication base stations

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.

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.

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.

The real data in terms of the power consumption and traffic load have been obtained from continuous measurements performed on a fully operated base station site. Measurements show the existence of a direct relationship between base station traffic load and power consumption.

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.

The largest energy consumer in the BS is the power amplifier, which has a share of around 65% of the total energy consumption [ 7 ]. Of the other base station elements, significant energy consumers are: air conditioning (17.5%), digital signal processing (10%) and AC/DC conversion elements (7.5%) [ 8 ].