Annual electricity cost of mobile base station equipment

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 largest energy consumer in the BS is the power amplifier, which has a share of around 65% of the total energy consumption . 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%) .

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%) . New research aimed at reducing energy consumption in the cellular access networks can be viewed in terms of three levels: component, link and network.

Assuming for simplicity equal energy consumption for each month during a year, total yearly energy consumption of this BS site is 64,171.2 kW. The operator has approximately 2,000 installed BS sites and average energy consumption per site is approximately 60% of monthly/yearly consumption of the analyzed BS site.

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.

Such a conservative approach leads us to a rough esimation of the operator's total yearly energy consumption. This consumption is vast, and on the level of the operator's radio access part of the network, equals approximately 7,700.54 MW.