Evaluation of Potential Energy Efficiency Gain of 5G Wireless Networks

In order to support orders of traffic explosion with sustainable energy consumption, besides conventional Spectrum Efficiency (SE), Energy Efficiency (EE) is proposed as another critical metric for the next generation mobile networks (5G). This paper proposes to evaluate the potential EE gain of 5G on the basis of EARTH Energy Efficiency Evaluation Framework (E3F). As E3F indicated, the large-scale network traffic over the long term is definitely heterogeneous, which is still the trend in 5G. In this paper, relationship is deduced between the global EE metric and the snapshot EE metrics, which are obtained from small scale and short term. To be specific, this paper considers two typical 5G scenarios as different snapshots: the indoor office and the outdoor open space gathering. Each snapshot scenario has its own combinations of service/applications, hence distinct traffic model and resulted network deployment, power consumption and EE. The power model used for EE evaluation considers the different bandwidth and antenna configurations for different types of Base Stations (BSs) in different scenarios, meanwhile, it identifies the long term hardware evolution as a key factor to predict future power consumptions. Numerical analysis reveals that up to 1000x EE gain can be achieved by 5G and gain of hundreds times can be realized in 5G era, when 4G coexist with 5G.