PARTNER CONTENT: Vice President of Huawei’s SingleRAN Product Line Li Haining emphasised the need to ensure the experience improvements delivered by 5.5G do not come at the cost of increased power consumption, a challenge the vendor’s latest 0 Bit, 0 Watt, 0 Loss concept has been designed to overcome.
At the Global Mobile Broadband Forum in Istanbul, Turkiye, the executive highlighted increased bandwidth and higher volumes of traffic in the network pipeline brought by the most modern generation of 5G has provided a challenge to ambitions to reduce energy use in the network.
“From our perspective there are two priorities” with regards 5.5G, he noted. “First of all with more traffic and more bands in the network we need to make sure that the power consumption will not continue to increase”.
The second, he stated, was to support new services and “on that basis we have to make sure we can deliver a network that is the best in terms of performance and increased power consumption is never experienced”.
As operators continue to commercialise 5G and install infrastructure to meet the surge in traffic brought about by the adoption of 5.5G, there is a concern this could lead to energy consumption rapidly increasing given a higher number of sites, frequency bands and channels being used.
Operators are also reporting a growth in demand for richer experiences from their customers which require infrastructure able to deliver them. As a result today and tomorrow’s networks need to be able to deliver on these promises alongside meeting vital sustainability criteria.
New concept
In order to meet this dual requirement to support higher bandwidth applications alongside energy saving, Huawei has developed its 0 Bit, 0 Watt, 0 Loss solution, unveiled at this year’s MBBF event.
It expands on the success of its GLOMO-award winning 0 Bit 0 Watt solution, which helps operators make their infrastructure more energy efficient.
Li told Mobile World Live its latest offering aimed to “make sure that we can conserve energy around the clock: during daytime and also at night. We hope that through this solution while we achieve the targets of energy consumption reduction we can also satisfy the experience requirements of all users”.
Referring to its 0 Bit, 0 Watt strategy, which the latest concept builds on, he noted the idea was originally based on minimising RF power to the lowest possible level when the network doesn’t carry any data.
The new 0 Bit, 0 Watt, 0 Loss solution further aids green efforts with three major areas: equipment, site and network.
It is designed to ensure operators achieve user experience and energy savings through high-efficiency equipment, ambient sites, and intelligent networks.
In terms of equipment Li said Huawei will “continue to pursue the lowest possible power consumption” including delivery of a fast wake-up capability, while citing a need to ensure 99 per cent of devices and equipment can be closed down when there is no data being carried on the network, such as during nighttime.
“The second aspect is the site,” he added. “For site optimisation we connect base station energy systems and the back-up power system to make sure that we can have a longer duration of power back-up”.
It is also able to cut energy use of the system by a “wattage boost mechanism” which can deliver further gains.
“At the network layer we have the iPowerStar solution,” Li added. “In the past with our innovative iPowerStar solutions and various parameters we delivered gains of 20 per cent at the network layer”.
“And now based on our modelling of user experience and energy consumption of the network we have delivered a solution that is the best in terms of experience and power consumption, and this has brought us an extra five per cent gain”.
Green challenge
In order to meet challenges and obstacles around innovation in this area, Huawei has made significant effort to improve architecture and algorithms used.
The latest moves are a continuation of the company’s long history in the development of green solutions to improve the sustainability credentials of operator networks which is a major priority for its customers across the globe.
Breakthroughs made by Huawei within the 0 Bit, 0 Watt, 0 Loss solution include improving the reliability of a ‘superdormancy’ capability and module through the application of moisture absorbing materials and application of granular architecture.
In its software architecture fresh innovations mean it is now able to meet the challenge of achieving energy consumption reduction around the clock using millisecond-level scheduling.
Li went on to note within hardware the PA module was a key contributor of power consumption, so it innovated around the materials used there.
“For example, we use gallium nitride and diamond substrates which improved the heat dissipation efficiency of the PA module by five times,” he added.
Call to industry
While its impressive breakthroughs made in energy efficiency within network solutions are being widely deployed by many operators across the world and well recognised by customers, Li made a call for two initiatives from the mobile ecosystem.
“First of all I hope that the industry can work together to develop a better energy efficiency model and advanced energy efficiency assessment criteria, so that so we can better evaluate the power consumption of different systems and modules at different conditions”.
“Second I hope that the entire industry can work together to deliver a solution that is best in terms of both power consumption and user experience,” he added, noting there was a need for joint efforts to make the world’s mobile infrastructure greener and more sustainable.