Toward Sustainable O-RAN Deployment: An In-Depth Analysis of Power Consumption

5G delivers limitless mobile broadband capabilities, enabling extensive connectivity for various devices, including smartphones, sensors, and machines. Its most notable feature lies in its ability to facilitate instantaneous and highly reliable machine communications. Because of the rapid evolution of communication networks, innovative architectures such as Open RAN (O-RAN) have emerged, promising increased flexibility, efficiency, and sustainability. To realize the full potential of ORAN networks, however, it is critical to understand their power consumption implications. In this paper, in order to understand the way O-RAN consumes energy, a comprehensive power consumption model is used. The study not only provides theoretical analysis but also incorporates a practical implementation of the architecture. For this, an algorithm is employed to determine a base monolithic architecture of O-RAN by the placement of Distributed Unit (DU) and Centralized Unit (CU) using available data of Radio Unit (RU) in France and Ireland. The research further explores the impact of different parameter variations in various Evaluation Scenarios (ESs) on the architecture. By conducting this thorough evaluation, this research provides valuable insights for researchers and industry practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of energy consumption patterns and derive ideas on how to effectively reduce power consumption in these networks.