Modeling of 5G Energy Efficiency on Example of Germany as Technological Basis for Intent-Based Networking

Abstract

AbstractTwo topics dominate the public debates today: environmental protection and digitalization. Both are very closely related: for example, digital technology in Germany consumes about as much energy per year as a large German city. At the same time, the total amount of data transmitted over Internet is increasing, which requires new methods for transmission of higher data volumes. As consequence, we must answer the question of how technical progress of digitalization could go along with environmental protection. This chapter addresses the question whether the new 5G network, which should be not only fast but also energy efficient, would be a reasonable solution for this. In this respect, we compare the current 3G and 4G mobile networks with the new 5G network regarding workload and energy efficiency based on the different variants of the development of transmitted data volumes in mobile networks in Germany. We estimate the energy consumption, the future data consumption and especially the energy efficiency of current networks and of the fifth generation of mobile communications for the coming years in Germany by statistical analysis using different models and extrapolation. The result shows that 5G is indeed more energy efficient than 4G, but only above a certain data volume per mobile cell. Still, with the increasing mobile traffic in the coming years, the 5G will clearly lead to better energy efficiency compared to previous technologies.Keywords5G4GEnergy efficiency