Green Radio The Case for More Efficient Cellular Base Stations

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1 Core 5 Research Programme Green Radio The Case for More Efficient Cellular Base Stations May 2009 Peter Grant University of Edinburgh and Mobile VCE Board Member

2 Presentation Overview The Current Status on Cellular Systems The Business Case for Green Radio Defining the Green Radio Issues Conclusions

3 Why Green Radio? Operator & Manufacturer Perspective Increasing energy costs with higher base station site density and energy price trends A typical UK mobile network consumes 40MW Overall this is a small % of total UK energy consumption, but with huge potential to save energy in other industries Energy cost and grid availability limit growth in emerging markets (high costs for diesel generators) Corporate Responsibility targets set to reduce carbon emissions and environmental impacts of networks Vodafone 1 - Group target to reduce CO 2 emissions by 50% by 2020, from 2006/07 levels Orange 2 : Reduce our greenhouse emissions per customer by 20% between 2006 and

4 Where is the Energy Used? For the operator, 57% of electricity use is in radio access Operating electricity is the dominant energy requirement at base stations For user devices, most of the energy used is due to manufacturing CO 2 emissions per subscriber per year 3 9kg CO 2 4.3kg CO 2 Base station Operation Embodied energy 2.6kg CO 2 8.1kg CO 2 Mobile 3. Tomas Edler, Green Base Stations How to Minimize CO 2 Emission in Operator Networks, Ericsson, Bath Base Station Conference 2008

5 UK Operator GSM + 3G Network Consumption Source: CR review, Vodafone UK, Corporate Responsibility 2007/08

6 Cellular Network Power Consumption Summary (from previous pie chart) Retail Data Centre Core Transmission Mobile Switching Base Stations 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Source: Vodafone

7 Base Station Power 2003 H. Karl, An overview of energy-efficiency techniques for mobile communication systems, Telecommunication Networks Group, Technical University Berlin, Tech. Rep. TKN-03-XXX, September [Online]. Available: karl/wg7/ag7mobikom- EnergyEfficiency-v1.0.pdf

8 Power Consumption Power Consumption per BS Now (Possible) Target (2010) GSM 800W 650W WCDMA 500W 300W Source: NSN

9 Energy Consumption The Base Station is the most energy intensive component of a 3G mobile network. A typical 3G Base Station consumes about 500 W with a output power of ~40 W. This makes the average annual energy consumption of a BS around 4.5 MWh (which is lower than a GSM BS).!A 3G mobile network with 12,000 BSs will consume over 50 GWh p.a. This not only responsible for a large amount CO 2 emission and it also increases the system OPEX. This is 10X consumption of a UK broadcast TV network This is worse in China with times number of mobile subscribers!

10 Energy Consumption The Challenge Since 2006, the growth rate of data traffic on mobile networks has been approximately 400% p.a.. It is expected to grow at least the same rate in coming years. This growth demands a much higher energy consumption than today. The challenge is how to design future mobile networks to be more energy efficient to accommodate the extra traffic.

11 Green Radio as an Enabler Costs Voice Data Traffic Time Revenue Diverging expectations for traffic and revenue growth Trends: Exponential growth in data traffic Number of base stations / area increasing for higher capacity Revenue growth constrained and dependent on new services Energy use cannot follow traffic growth without significant increase in energy consumption Must reduce energy use per data bit carried Number of base stations increasing Operating power per cell must reduce Green radio is a key enabler for cellular growth while guarding against increased environmental impact Traffic / revenue curve from The Mobile Broadband Vision - How to make LTE a success, Frank Meywerk, Senior Vice President Radio Networks, T-Mobile Germany, LTE World Summit, November 2008, London

12 2020 Vision Paper The Challenge The Mobile VCE Visions Group comprising global thoughts leaders in the industry articulated the need. Arguably what is needed are wireless access systems that can support multimedia service data rates at two or three orders of magnitude lower transmission power than currently used. Performance of today s radio access technologies is in fact already approaching the Shannon Bound such an advance will not come simply from more traditional research on single aspects of the physical layer, but will require holistic, system-wide, breakthrough thinking that challenges basic assumptions Mobile VCE consultation paper, 2020 Vision Enabling the Digital Future Dec 07 Mobile VCE Green Radio programme formulated to: Take forward existing research

13 Broadband Traffic on Mobile Networks Revenue increase is not in line with traffic growth * Average annual increase in traffic: 400% Average annual increase in revenue: 23% With the launch of HSDPA and the introduction of flat-rate pricing, data traffic is increasing Traffic is growing faster than the revenue increase The biggest traffic growth is seen at operators whose data pricing is more aggressive than the average * Source: Stanley Chia, Workshop on As the Internet takes to the air, do mobile revenue go sky high?, IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, April 2008.

14 Possible Solutions Green Radio Can we benefit from the use of the information below in the design of future mobile networks?: Mobility pattern (location, speed and direction of mobile user) information Characteristic of multimedia traffic (traffic classification) Transmission power scaling (distribution) in order to use renewable energy for BSs.

15 Green Radio Scenarios Two Market Profiles: 1. Developed World Developed Infrastructure Saturated Markets Quality of Service Key Issue Drive is to Reduce Costs 2. Emerging Markets Less Established Infrastructure Rapidly Expanding Markets Large Geographical Areas Often no mains power supply power consumption a major issue

16 Over a year, 1m 2 solar panel produces ~400 kwh energy, or about 10% of a 3G macrocell BS requirement (in London, < 5%). Note that we never recover the embodied or manufacturing energy! A combination of solar & wind sources, in a good location may provide the energy requirement for a small (pico-femto) BS?

17 Industry Subscription/Gvt funded Collaboration Core 5 research programme, targets: 1. Green Radio 2. Flexible Networks 3. User interactions

18 GR Industrial Leadership Team Chairman Simon Fletcher NEC Deputy Chairman Andy Jeffries Nortel Deputy Chairman David Lister Vodafone Industry Steering Group participants so far

19 GR Academic Leadership Team Prof. Steve McLaughlin (Academic Co-ordinator) Dr. John Thompson Dr. Dave Laurenson Prof. Tim O'Farrell Dr. Pavel Loskot Dr. Jianhua He Prof. Joe McGeehan Dr. Simon Armour Dr. Kevin Morris Prof. Hamid Aghvami Dr. Mohammad Reza Nakhai Dr. Vasilis Friderikos

20 Green Radio Programme Organisation Industry Steering Group Energy Focus Group Flexible Networks Program GR1: Architecture 2 PDRAs, 5 PhDs To identify a green network architecture - a low power wireless network & backhaul that still provides good quality of service GR2: Techniques 2 PDRAs, 7 PhDs To identify the best radio techniques across all layers of the protocol stack that collectively can achieve 100x power reduction 2 Technical Work Areas - 48 Man Years

21 Reducing Power Consumption Through Delay-Tolerant Networking 1. Conventional Cellular 2. In-Building Relay 4. Heterogeneous Relay 3. Multi-hop Relay

22 Conclusion Growth in data transmission requirements for mobile broadband will not bring major revenue increase. Every industry has published CO 2 reduction targets and the mobile and IT communities are not exempt. Power drain in base-station or access point is the major issue in many wireless systems. Green Radio promised to deliver benefit to the Cellular network Operators via the equipment supply chain vendors. We plan to research and investigate changes to the system architecture and develop advanced networking techniques to deliver these future more efficient Green Radio systems.

Thank you! Further information on MobileVCE contact: Dr Walter Tuttlebee, E-mail: walter.tuttlebee@mobilevce.

23 Thank you! Further information on MobileVCE contact: Dr Walter Tuttlebee, Tel: WWW: For Green Radio please contact: Simon Fletcher Tel: or Steve McLaughlin

Led by Prof. Hamid Aghvami Presented by Dr. Xiaoli Chu. UK-China Science Bridges: R&D on 4G Wireless Mobile Communications

Led by Prof. Hamid Aghvami Presented by Dr. Xiaoli Chu 1 Introduction Future Work Research Areas Research Projects Statistics 2 King s College London was founded in 1829 and is the fourth oldest university