Measurement-based energy consumption profiling of mobile radio networks

The exponential growth of mobile traffic is forcing operators to increase quickly the capacity of their network and extend it with new technologies and improved topologies, such as heterogeneous layouts with small cells. However, since revenues cannot grow at the same rate of traffic, the main challenge is to manage capacity expansion with reduced costs. In addition to fixed costs for the new network infrastructures, operational costs are becoming critical, mainly for energy bill component. Moreover, the carbon footprint of mobile access networks is considered one of the largest of the whole ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sector and its reduction is fundamental for the environmental sustainability of the Internet economy. Due to these reasons, improving the energy efficiency of the access network is crucial for mobile operators. In order to do that, monitoring the energy consumption of the network components and defining models of energy profile are valuable approaches for estimating energy costs and identifying the most efficient configurations. In this paper, we present an energy consumption monitoring system that has been designed and implemented in three different countries using separate sensors for the radio and base-band components of second, third and fourth generation systems. We also propose an energy profiling approach that simplifies the characterization of the different components and allows the estimation of the energy efficiency based on traffic statistics.