Enabling Network Power Savings in 5G-Advanced and Beyond

Energy consumption is a critical concern for the 5G mobile operators. 5G NR network may have increased energy consumption compared to its predecessors as it aims to support a plethora of services demanding diverse QoS constraints and requiring deployment of radios at different frequency layers with potentially wider bandwidth and more antennas. Moreover, it is important for the operators to keep the operational expenses and carbon emissions as low as possible as well. At 3GPP, UE power saving has mainly been the focus from Rel 15 till Rel 17 and in Rel 18, a new study item has been introduced to investigate different network power saving techniques. In this paper, we first discuss why 5G NR poses unique challenges for energy consumption with respect to its predecessors. We aim to explore different potential techniques for network power savings via resource adaptation in time, frequency, spatial, and power domain. We also investigate power consumption based on energy consumption model adopted by 3GPP and provide energy efficiency - throughput trade-off analysis to identify which domain has the highest potential for power savings.