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.
Highlights
Mobile data services will witness unprecedented usage with the advent of the fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR) and Beyond-5G (B5G) networks
5G will be unprecedented: despite being prepared and designed to be optimized by design, with several energy efficiency (EE) techniques combined with several methods to increase overall throughput and user quality of experience (QoE) and overall quality of service (QoS), B5G NR networks will face a multitude of challenges driven by massive data-hungry subscribers and highly performant end user devices capable of generating enormous amounts of traffic, not solely in downlink and in uplink. 5G NR and beyond will be fully heterogenous networks (HetNets), with cellular radio access technology (RAT) and wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) RAT, where Internet of things (IoT) devices will play an important role [1]
Despite being out of the scope of the current work, we believe that there is enough relevancy on the subject that justifies enumerating some of the techniques that have been developed to reduce overall energy consumption. We argue that such techniques are of utmost importance, representing a first tier of carbon footprint (CF) reduction because they contribute very relevantly to overall power consumption, and there are methods that transversally focus on all network edges, ranging from the device/subscriber edge/plane to the network edge/plane
Summary
Mobile data services will witness unprecedented usage with the advent of the fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR) and Beyond-5G (B5G) networks. 5G NR and beyond will be fully heterogenous networks (HetNets), with cellular radio access technology (RAT) and wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) RAT, where Internet of things (IoT) devices will play an important role [1]. Another massification will take place: the deployment of additional mobile base stations, whether they are totally physical or partially virtualized on cloud environments. All of this will make 5G NR and beyond densified networks (DenseNets) [2,3]
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