Power and energy efficiency of telecom equipment in the context of dynamic capacity scaling

Telecom operator networks are widely ramified and distributed communication infrastructures typically covering large geographical areas: Encompassing a plethora of active systems, they consume large amounts of electricity. Currently, general-purpose systems and virtualization concepts - that are known from information technology and data centers - are observed to diffuse into such telecom operator networks to improve their production efficiency and flexibility. When it comes to energy efficiency in this context, two effects are debated: On the one hand those trends may lead to an increased power consumption driven by the not-so-specialized equipment, on the other hand the usage of such types of equipment and related techniques may enable improved load-adaptive operation regimes via inherent greater flexibility in capacity provisioning, scaling and usage variability. To assess this trade-off between network power consumption and operational flexibility, an analytic calculation model relying on sinusoidal traffic characteristics and an affine-linear network equipment model is established. The traffic and equipment modelling relies on approximations of real-world observations of traffic and networking systems' behavior. Numerical results show that additional system power consumption can be allowed for general-purpose systems using virtualization techniques to enable dynamic capacity scaling regimes as compared to conventional purpose-built telecom systems when targeting equal energy. For this discussion it is important to carefully distinguish between the two different physical values of power and energy. Furthermore, the application to practice-oriented traffic and network element characteristics confirms that the analytic results are well suited to obtain limits and insights for real-world network systems.