How much power does a 5G base station consume?

That’s almost a threefold increase compared to 4G (5). One 5G base station is estimated to consume about as much power as 73 households (6), and 3x as much as the previous generation of base stations (5), (7).

What is a 5G base station?

A 5G base station is mainly composed of the baseband unit (BBU) and the AAU — in 4G terms, the AAU is the remote radio unit (RRU) plus antenna. The role of the BBU is to handle baseband digital signal processing, while the AAU converts the baseband digital signal into an analog signal, and then modulates it into a high-frequency radio signal.

Is 5G more energy efficient than 4G?

Although the absolute value of the power consumption of 5G base stations is increasing, their energy efficiency ratio is much lower than that of 4G stations. In other words, with the same power consumption, the network capacity of 5G will be as dozens of times larger than 4G, so the power consumption per bit is sharply reduced.

Can network energy saving technologies mitigate 5G energy consumption?

This technical report explores how network energy saving technologies that have emerged since the 4G era, such as carrier shutdown, channel shutdown, symbol shutdown etc., can be leveraged to mitigate 5G energy consumption.

Is a 5G energy saving solution enough?

It also analyses how enhanced technologies like deep sleep, symbol aggregation shutdown etc., have been developing in the 5G era. This report aims to detail these fundamentals. However, it is far away from being enough, a revolutionized energy saving solution should be taken into consideration.

Can 5G reduce energy consumption?

However, the energy consumption of 5G networks is today a concern. In recent years, the design of new methods for decreasing the RAN power consumption has attracted interest from both the research community and standardization bodies, and many energy savings solutions have been proposed.