Modeling Energy Consumption of Mobile Radio Networks: An Operator Perspective

The exponential growth of mobile traffic is forcing operators to quickly increase the capacity of their networks by means of new technologies and advanced architectures. This capacity expansion not only brings increasing fixed costs for additional network infrastructures, but also inflates operational costs, which are becoming critical, mainly in terms of energy bills. In this perspective, monitoring the energy consumption of network devices and defining their energy profile models are valuable approaches for estimating energy costs and identifying the most efficient configurations. In this article, we propose an energy profiling approach that simplifies the characterization of different base station components and allows the estimation of the network energy efficiency relying only on traffic statistics. We have validated the approach over the extensive dataset of real measurements provided by a probe network for monitoring live energy consumption of Vodafone sites in three different countries.