Factual Quantification Methods of Energy Consumption for Transmission Nodes in Cellular Communication Systems: Experimental Case Study in Lome

Abstract

The energy efficiency for wireless communication technology standard is very important for the current and the future generation ones. Noting that the energy consumption in communication systems is constantly increasing due to the exponential number of subscribers and high data services demand. In this regard, it becomes necessary to quantify this energy consumption with respect to the communication technology standard at the site. This article presents an evaluation of the factual quantifications methods for the energy consumption of transmission nodes in cellular communications systems. The data collection was obtained on three types of communication technology standards namely second generation (2G), 3G, 4G and their combination using the direct and indirect (the utility records) methods power measurement on the field installation of a mobile telephone operator in Togo. These data have undergone a preprocessing in the Microsoft Excel software (version 2019), then sent in the Matlab software (Matlab R2020b) for further analysis. The results showed that the energy consumption observed at the site is around 124 kWh, 254, kWh and 362 kWh on monthly average respectively for 2G, 2G/3G, and 2G/3G/4G typology used. It further indicated that when more communication standards are used on a given site, its power consumption is much more increasing. The power profile distribution has been investigated, and the analysis revealed that the normal distribution closely fitted the data. However, more parameters related to the number of utilised channels and climatic conditions need to be considered in future research works.

Keywords

• cellular communication systems
• distribution fitting tool
• energy consumption
• power profile quantification