Sustainable Connections: Exploring Energy Efficiency in 5G Networks
Pages 33 - 40
Abstract
Although 5G networks offer larger capacity due to more antennas and larger bandwidths, their increased energy consumption is concerning. This paper investigates energy consumption issues from widespread 5G deployment using city-scale real-world mobile network data. Our dataset includes traffic volume, energy consumption, and base station attributes spanning May 2022, July 2023, and April 2024, covering over 10,000 4G and 5,000 5G base stations. A portion of the dataset is published on GitHub. We develop high-accuracy models to profile 4G and 5G base station energy consumption, revealing 5G inefficiencies under low traffic loads. We identify energy efficiency traps where network energy efficiency drops post-5G deployment. Our study estimates the recovery time from energy efficiency traps, emphasizes that different functional regions have varying recovery levels, and analyzes the reasons for these differences. We provide recommendations for deploying and commercializing 5G to promote sustainable connectivity.
References
[1]
Paul G Bain, Pieter M Kroonenberg, Lars-Olof Johansson, Taciano L Milfont, Charlie R Crimston, Tim Kurz, Ekaterina Bushina, Carolina Calligaro, Christophe Demarque, Yanjun Guan, et al. 2019. Public views of the Sustainable Development Goals across countries. Nature sustainability, Vol. 2, 9 (2019), 819--825.
[2]
Xiaoyuan Cheng, Yukun Hu, and Liz Varga. 2022. 5G network deployment and the associated energy consumption in the UK: A complex systems? exploration. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Vol. 180 (2022), 121672.
[3]
Antonio De Domenico, David López-Pérez, Wenjie Li, Nicola Piovesan, Harvey Bao, and Xinli Geng. 2023. Modeling User Transfer During Dynamic Carrier Shutdown in Green 5G Networks. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 22, 8 (2023), 5536--5549.
[4]
Pal Frenger and Richard Tano. 2019. More capacity and less power: How 5G NR can reduce network energy consumption. In 2019 IEEE 89th vehicular technology conference (VTC2019-Spring). IEEE, 1--5.
[5]
Louis Golard, Jérôme Louveaux, and David Bol. 2023. Evaluation and projection of 4G and 5G RAN energy footprints: The case of Belgium for 2020--2025. Annals of Telecommunications, Vol. 78, 5 (2023), 313--327.
[6]
Jiahui Gong, Qiaohong Yu, Tong Li, Haoqiang Liu, Jun Zhang, Hangyu Fan, Depeng Jin, and Yong Li. 2023. Scalable digital twin system for mobile networks with generative ai. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services. 610--611.
[7]
Jianpei Han, Nian Liu, and Jo ao PS Catal ao. 2022. Optimization of Distribution Network and Mobile Network With Interactive Balance of Flexibility and Power. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 38, 3 (2022), 2512--2524.
[8]
Tong Li, Li Yu, Yibo Ma, Tong Duan, Wenzhen Huang, Yan Zhou, Depeng Jin, Yong Li, and Tao Jiang. 2023. Carbon emissions of 5G mobile networks in China. Nature Sustainability, Vol. 6, 12 (2023), 1620--1631.
[9]
Josip Lorincz, Zvonimir Klarin, and Dinko Begusic. 2021. Modeling and analysis of data and coverage energy efficiency for different demographic areas in 5G networks. IEEE Systems Journal, Vol. 16, 1 (2021), 1056--1067.
[10]
Guiyang Luo, Quan Yuan, Jinglin Li, Shangguang Wang, and Fangchun Yang. 2022. Artificial intelligence powered mobile networks: From cognition to decision. IEEE Network, Vol. 36, 3 (2022), 136--144.
[11]
Panu Lähdekorpi, Michal Hronec, Petri Jolma, and Jani Moilanen. 2017. Energy efficiency of 5G mobile networks with base station sleep modes. In 2017 IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN). IEEE, 163--168. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCN.2017.8088616
[12]
James Manyika and Charles Roxburgh. 2011. The great transformer: The impact of the Internet on economic growth and prosperity. McKinsey Global Institute, Vol. 1, 0360--8581 (2011).
[13]
Arvind Narayanan, Xumiao Zhang, Ruiyang Zhu, Ahmad Hassan, Shuowei Jin, Xiao Zhu, Xiaoxuan Zhang, Denis Rybkin, Zhengxuan Yang, Zhuoqing Morley Mao, et al. 2021. A variegated look at 5G in the wild: performance, power, and QoE implications. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference. ACM New York, NY, USA, 610--625.
[14]
Nisha Panwar, Shantanu Sharma, and Awadhesh Kumar Singh. 2016. A survey on 5G: The next generation of mobile communication. Physical Communication, Vol. 18 (2016), 64--84.
[15]
Chunyi Peng, Suk-Bok Lee, Songwu Lu, Haiyun Luo, and Hewu Li. 2011. Traffic-driven power saving in operational 3G cellular networks. In Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking. ACM New York, NY, USA, 121--132.
[16]
People's Republic of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. 2022. Statistics in Communication Industry. https://www.miit.gov.cn/gxsj/tjfx/txy/index.html.
[17]
Nicola Piovesan, David López-Pérez, Antonio De Domenico, Xinli Geng, Harvey Bao, and Mérouane Debbah. 2022. Machine learning and analytical power consumption models for 5G base stations. IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 60, 10 (2022), 56--62.
[18]
Rumeng Tan, Ying Shi, Yingying Fan, Wentao Zhu, and Tong Wu. 2022. Energy saving technologies and best practices for 5G radio access network. Ieee Access, Vol. 10 (2022), 51747--51756.
[19]
Dongzhu Xu, Anfu Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Guixian Wang, Xi Liu, Congkai An, Yiming Shi, Liang Liu, and Huadong Ma. 2020. Understanding operational 5G: A first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption. In Proceedings of the Annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication. 479--494.
[20]
Xiaodong Zhang, Philippe Ciais, Xiaohu Jian, Xinrui Liu, Rong Wang, Kaijie Chen, Yufei Huang, Tao Huang, Hong Gao, Yuan Zhao, et al. 2023. The carbon footprint response to projected base stations of China's 5G mobile network. Science of The Total Environment, Vol. 870 (2023), 161906.
Index Terms
- Sustainable Connections: Exploring Energy Efficiency in 5G Networks
Recommendations
Green IT Meaning in Energy Monitoring Practices: The Case of Danish Households
AbstractEco-conferences like COP26 in Glasgow (UK) in 2021 have brought the debate on energy consumption and climate change to the fore. Given that a third of the energy produced worldwide is consumed in the home, it is pertinent to investigate how ...
Energy Efficiency Trade-Off Between Duty-Cycling and Wake-Up Radio Techniques in IoT Networks
AbstractEnergy consumption has become dominant issue for wireless internet of things (IoT) networks with battery-powered nodes. The prevailing mechanism allowing to reduce energy consumption is duty-cycling. In this technique the node sleeps most of the ...
Energy efficiency of joint base station and relay sleeping in heterogeneous networks
Energy efficiency (EE) is an important criterion in devising emerging mobile networks. One of the techniques that has been proposed to reduce energy consumption of base stations (BSs) in cellular networks is BS sleep mode. In this work, the effect of ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
December 2024
80 pages
ISBN:9798400711084
DOI:10.1145/3680121
- General Chairs:
- Vijay Gopalakrishnan,
- Jia Wang,
- Program Chairs:
- Ihsan Ayyub Qazi,
- Gareth Tyson
Copyright © 2024 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 09 December 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Short-paper
Funding Sources
Conference
CoNEXT '24
Sponsor:
CoNEXT '24: The 20th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
December 9 - 12, 2024
CA, Los Angeles, USA
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 128Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)128
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)33
Reflects downloads up to 27 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in