Analysis of energy consumption in carrier networks

For operating large-scale telecommunication networks, considerable amounts of energy are necessary. Besides other forms of energy - like fossil fuels, district heating, and fuels for the vehicle fleet - the major network energy demand is that for electricity to power the network itself and other equipment in offices and workspaces. Large shares of network electricity are consumed by legacy network parts followed by mobile and fixed access networks. Aggregation, core, and optical transport networks contribute only modest shares to the telecommunication network electricity consumption. The network equipment is accommodated in different classes of network production sites ranging from large indoor central offices to small outdoor sites. The number of sites per site class increases in tendency the smaller the respective sites are: those smaller sites essentially provide coverage over large geographical areas and consume only small amounts of electricity per site. However, these smaller indoor and outdoor sites in total consume major shares of the total network electricity. Current and anticipated trends point towards network platform consolidation and extended installation of small outdoor network sites to improve the production efficiency and to satisfy the increasing user demand for bit rate and mobile service usage. Therefore it is mandatory that energy efficiency is one of the key design criteria for future networks and the related systems in order to decrease or at least stabilize the telecommunication network energy consumption.