Three considerations when planning to power 5G infrastructure

Source: Huawei. Fang poses with a facsimile of the white paper.

At Mobile World Congress 2019, Huawei released 5G Power White Paper for the industry. The document analyses the requirements and challenges, as well as the design concepts and scenarios of 5G power. According to the white paper, 5G power needs to be simple, intelligent, and efficient.

In the white paper, Huawei explains that the power consumption of a single 5G site is much higher than that of a 4G site. To meet the service requirements of network capacity boost in the 5G era, a large number of end sites will be deployed, and the power consumption of the entire network will increase exponentially. Carriers face the challenges of insufficient capacity of mains supply, power distribution, and cooling system.

In the future, the number of devices will increase as more bands of higher frequency are configured. Maintenance becomes more difficult, and the labour cost keeps rising, causing higher site maintenance costs.

"In-depth researches on 5G power construction mode are an important and urgent task to address the challenges of 5G deployment on energy and improve the investment efficiency of carriers. We believe that 5G power solutions need to meet the requirements of low-cost deployment, fast construction, energy saving, smooth evolution, and simple O&M." said Fang Liangzhou, VP of Huawei Network Energy Product Line. O&M stands for operations and maintenance. 

Huawei proposes in the white paper that 5G power design needs to be simple, intelligent, and efficient.

Simple

5G solutions need to achieve smaller footprints, simple installations, fast deployment, and simple O&M.

Intelligent

Based on the concept of Bit Manage Watt, 5G power uses AI and cloud technologies to implement multilevel intelligent collaboration between power supply and site devices, as well as power supply and network devices.

Functional power supplies can be replaced with intelligent ones, which greatly reduces the CAPEX and OPEX of sites. At the same time, the traditional manual O&M needs to become more efficient and intelligent.

Efficient

Instead of traditional single-component energy-saving designs, 5G power requires end-to-end full-link energy-saving designs that consider the power supply, conversion, power backup, power distribution, cooling, and load. In the power supply phase, various types of new energy access are supported to save energy and achieve the goal of 0 bit 0 watt.

The white paper points out that One Band One Blade, and One Site One Cabinet are ideal solutions for various scenarios including the overlay scenario, the site upgrade and reconstruction scenario, a micro base station or a new site.

Lithium batteries will become a mandatory energy storage mode for 5G sites in the future, Huawei said, predicting that as the technology advances, lithium battery cost is reduced.

"By analysing energy pain points faced by carriers in network evolution, we present you (the) 5G Power White Paper. Huawei looks forward to extending the communication and cooperation with the white paper as a base. Huawei is willing to work with carriers and industry partners to promote energy innovation and embrace the 5G era," said Fang.

Mobile World Congress 2019 was held from February 25 to 28 in Barcelona, Spain.

Hashtag: #MWC19