Power management seen as a key component to growing the small cell footprint necessary for support of telecom industry’s 5G and IoT plans.
SANTA CLARA, California – The telecommunication industry’s move towards a greater reliance on data centers to serve the needs of upcoming “5G” technology and internet of things-based services is expected to place a stronger emphasis on power management of those facilities.
Speaking during a engineering workshop at this week’s Open Compute Project U.S. Summit, Brian Zahnstecher, principal at PowerRox, noted a major difference and paradigm shift on this move towards 5G will be a growing reliance on a much greater number of small cells instead of traditional macro base stations. Many of these small cell deployments are set to include greater processing power so as to act like small data centers, which could allow for some creative energy management possibilities.
Zahnstecher explained this new network architecture will see distributed cell sites serving a much smaller radius of users, though will likely also include greater processing capabilities in order to support mobile edge computing plans.
“A base station that serves only 10 meters still needs to keep the spirit of mobile edge computing and will have to keep as much processing as possible at the edge,” Zahnstecher said. “This will drive the paradigm shift in power as well with the one to two kilowatts of power for macro base stations now shifting to tens of watts or less for each small cell.”
Zahnstecher followed up by asking which would be more efficient: more power for one large base station or less power for a number of smaller deployments?
“What’s more efficient? That’s not easy to say,” Zahnstecher said. “Small cells can be more dynamic in terms of turning power on and off, but it’s a multifaceted issue.”
With telecom operators looking to trim operating expenses wherever possible, being able to dynamically tune energy consumption to the expected hundreds of thousands of small cells is set to be a significant part of network planning. The ongoing deployment of software solutions using network functions virtualization, software-defined networking and cloud platforms is expected to bolster the ability to deal with power optimization.
“It’s an absolute necessity to have NFV and SDN to support 5G,” Zahnstecher noted.
Telecom operators could also take a page out of the current Wi-Fi playbook by offloading some of the electrical requirements to end users in a move Zahnstecher said would be like tricking the customer into paying the power bill. This would be similar to current picocell deployments where a customer looking to increase cellular reception inside of a home or business would become responsible for providing the power and backhaul capabilities for that device.
Bored? Why not follow me on Twitter.
Photo copyright: abluecup / 123RF Stock Photo
