Battery groups are installed as backup power in most of the base stations in case of power outages due to severe weathers or human-driven accidents, particularly in remote areas.
Why should a 5G base station have a backup battery?
The backup battery of a 5G base station must ensure continuous power supply to it, in the case of a power failure. As the number of 5G base stations, and their power consumption increase significantly compared with that of 4G base stations, the demand for backup batteries increases simultaneously.
Why do cellular base stations have backup batteries?
[...] Cellular base stations (BSs) are equipped with backup batteries to obtain the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and maintain the power supply reliability. While maintaining the reliability, the backup batteries of 5G BSs have some spare capacity over time due to the traffic-sensitive characteristic of 5G BS electricity load.
How does a battery group work in a base station?
The equipment in base stations is usually supported by the utility grid, where the battery group is installed as the backup power. In case that the utility grid interrupts, the battery discharges to support the communication switching equipment during the period of the power outage.
Can a battery group be used as a backup power supply?
In practice, the battery groups (either traditional lead-acid batteries or emerging lithium ones) are deployed as the backup power supply of BSs. In our scenario, one battery group could be shared by multiple BSs nearby to exploit the statistical multiplexing gain, and the multiple BSs sharing the same battery group form a virtual cell (VC).
In this paper, we closely examine the base station features and backup battery features from a 1.5-year dataset of a major cellular service provider, including 4,206 base stations distributed across 8,400 square kilometers and more than 1.5 billion records on base stations and battery statuses.
Our real trace-driven data analysis clearly reveals that in the battery allocation strategy currently used in practice, there exists a mismatch between the supporting ability of backup batteries and the power outage situations in each base sta-tion. The mismatch can lead to serious problems in base sta-tions.