3
White paper
Reducing energy use with 5G-Advanced
Executive summary
Communications service providers strive to provide coverage, capacity and superior service quality while
facing the challenges of ever-increasing trac volumes, carbon neutrality targets, and higher costs of
energy. Reducing the energy use of mobile networks to address these challenges is an urgent imperative.
The eorts from the industry primarily revolve around the radio access network (RAN), which has the
greatest impact as it consumes over 80% of mobile network energy. Nokia is making a continuous eort
to decrease RAN energy consumption and improve the energy eciency using the many available levers
and measures: from network modernization and renewable energy sourcing solutions to advanced energy-
saving features across the entire product portfolio.
As the radio technology strongly inuences the ability to minimize energy use, Nokia is also actively engaged in
the 3GPP standardization of new enablers in 5G-Advanced. These enablers are designed to facilitate
dynamic energy-saving techniques for 5G base stations (gNBs). The objective is to reduce gNB energy use
by operating the radios more eciently than today without compromising service quality. The key techniques
of 5G-Advanced allow the gNB to adapt active antennas, transmission power and time resources to
changes in trac load and end users’ QoS needs. Specically, these techniques allow adaptations to be
more dynamic and at a more granular level than in today’s networks. Further, they can use enhanced
feedback from the device to determine the optimal adaptation to be applied by the network. Base station
hardware can then be deactivated when the load decreases and quickly reactivated when the load increases
again, in turn reducing energy use especially during the often occurring low-to-medium load scenarios.
Nokia has been a key contributor to dene and assess the network energy-saving (NES) techniques of
5G-Advanced for their potential energy-saving gains and user throughput performance impact. As an
essential tool for the evaluation, within the 3GPP, we have dened a common evaluation methodology and,
for the rst time, a gNB power consumption model.
In this white paper, we examine the 5G RAN energy-saving techniques introduced in 3GPP Release 18,
describe how these can strengthen the broad energy-saving toolbox oered by Nokia, and provide
recommendations on their use. Dynamic adaptations of transmission power and antennas improve the
energy eciency of the base station transmissions the most and obtain 15–30% energy savings under
low-to-medium cell load levels. When looking at a daily average load, these techniques when jointly
used also provide the best tradeos between energy savings and throughput impact. The summary of
the network energy-saving gain and throughput impact obtained by the four key techniques of Release
18 standalone as well as the joint use of antenna and power adaptation (see results in the light blue)
is provided in Figure 1 for dierent cell load levels. In general, these techniques must be applied with a
careful design to mitigate the throughput loss they may cause.
This white paper concludes with our view on the anticipated additional energy-saving techniques that may
be expected beyond Release 18.
