Abstract
The heated 5G network deployment race has already begun with the rapid progress in standardization efforts, backed by the current market availability of 5G-enabled network equipment, ongoing 5G spectrum auctions, early launching of non-standalone 5G network services in a few countries, among others. In this paper, we study current and future wireless networks from the viewpoint of energy efficiency (EE) and sustainability to meet the planned network and service evolution toward, along, and beyond 5G, as also inspired by the findings of the EU Celtic-Plus SooGREEN Project. We highlight the opportunities seized by the project efforts to enable and enrich this green nature of the network as compared to existing technologies. In specific, we present innovative means proposed in SooGREEN to monitor and evaluate EE in 5G networks and beyond. Further solutions are presented to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint in the different network segments. The latter spans proposed virtualized/cloud architectures, efficient polar coding for fronthauling, mobile network powering via renewable energy and smart grid integration, passive cooling, smart sleeping modes in indoor systems, among others. Finally, we shed light on the open opportunities yet to be investigated and leveraged in future developments.
Highlights
Unlike earlier generations, 5G and beyond networks are required to simultaneously support a multitude of services that have very diverse trade-offs in their requested service levels
To strike an efficient yet fair sharing point, we propose to share the fixed energy component between service categories based on a cooperative game-theoretic concept; the Shapley value
We enable shutting down midhaul, fronthaul, and radio access components at very low load where some remote sites do not have any active user
Summary
5G and beyond networks are required to simultaneously support a multitude of services that have very diverse trade-offs in their requested service levels. The traffic is no longer addressed as a bulk, but decomposed into different specific categories (streaming, browsing, IoT,...etc) that allow proposing dedicated solutions This new way of thinking should allow for a real assessment of service energy consumption and design enablers that help alleviating the service impact on the content-specific technology and QoS requirements. Further supporting solutions to this proposed architecture are presented afterwards, namely, bandwidth-efficient forward error correction (FEC) using polar coding for efficient fronthauling, and hardware acceleration to optimize function-specific computations at the ECs. In section IV, green mobile network powering using RE sources is discussed, with contributions on their integration to future smart grids and efficient energy storage systems.
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