Power Consumption: 5G Basestations Are Hungry, Hungry Hippos
The increased power consumption of next-generation basestations may be one of the dirty little secrets of 5G, which might not be a secret much longer as operators roll out
“A 5G base station is generally expected to consume roughly three times as much power as a 4G base station. And more 5G base stations are needed to cover the same area,” -IEEE Spectrum, 5G's Waveform Is a Battery Vampire
However, Li says 5G base stations are carrying five times the traffic as when equipped with only 4G, pushing up power consumption. The carrier is seeking subsidies from the Chinese government to help with the increased energy usage.
Although the absolute value of the power consumption of 5G base stations is increasing, their energy efficiency ratio is much lower than that of 4G stations. In other words, with the same power consumption, the network capacity of 5G will be as dozens of times larger than 4G, so the power consumption per bit is sharply reduced.
Simulation results reveal that more than 50% of the energy is consumed by the computation power at 5G small cell BS's. Moreover, the computation power of 5G small cell BS can approach 800 watt when the massive MIMO (e.g., 128 antennas) is deployed to transmit high volume traffic.
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