Huawei base station power efficiency calculation

The base station sites are the largest energy consumers in a mobile network, consuming about 73% of the total energy of a typical operator according to a GSMA in 2021 based on a study of 31 networks, see Figure 3. When considering only the energy consumed by the cellular network, the base stations energy consumption goes up to 77%.

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.

From the perspective of energy saving, antennas with high RF efficiency can be used to reduce the power consumption of the base station by reducing the transmit power of the radio unit while maintaining the same coverage quality. The following describes the details from the two perspectives.

The model by Auer et al. described in, was developed as part of the EARTH (Energy Aware Radio and neTwork tecHnologies) project. It is based on measurements of LTE hardware. Most notably, the model proposes a linear increase of power consumption with the output power (or load) of the base station.

Base station: from the DC power input (PBS) to the cabinet-top power output of the base station antenna (Poutput). The power efficiency of a base station can be measured by dividing the cabinet-top power Poutput by the DC input power PBS of the base station.

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.