One Step Greener: Reducing 5G and Beyond Networks’ Carbon Footprint by 2-Tiering Energy Efficiency with CO2 Offsetting

Abstract

Fifth generation (5G) and Beyond-5G (B5G) will be characterized by highly dense deployments, both on network plane and user plane. Internet of Things, massive sensor deployments and base stations will drive even more energy consumption. User behavior towards mobile service usage is witnessing a paradigm shift with heavy capacity, demanding services resulting in an increase of both screen time and data transfers, which leads to additional power consumption. Mobile network operators will face additional energetic challenges, mainly related to power consumption and network sustainability, starting right in the planning phase with concepts like energy efficiency and greenness by design coming into play. The main contribution of this work is a two-tier method to address such challenges leading to positively-offset carbon dioxide emissions related to mobile networks using a novel approach. The first tier contributes to overall power reduction and optimization based on energy efficient methods applied to 5G and B5G networks. The second tier aims to offset the remaining operational power usage by completely offsetting its carbon footprint through geosequestration. This way, we show that the objective of minimizing overall networks’ carbon footprint is achievable. Conclusions are drawn and it is shown that carbon sequestration initiatives or program adherence represent a negligible cost impact on overall network cost, with the added value of greener and more environmentally friendly network operation. This can also relieve the pressure on mobile network operators in order to maximize compliance with environmentally neutral activity.