Power Consumption Analysis of 5G Transmit Antenna Topologies and Beamforming Schemes

Abstract

An exponential growth in the mobile communications industry over the past decade has raised concerns over it’s energy consumption, especially in light of the current climate crisis. 5G technologies in particular exhibit features that imply high power consumption, such as the densification of 5G base stations. Implementing mitigation measures requires accurate a priori knowledge of the power consumption of 5G array architectures in various scenarios; however, there are large gaps in the literature on this topic, and existing power consumption models for 5G array architectures only address a limited scope of use cases and array topologies. Recent works have focused on the energy efficiency of array architectures, but not on the actual amount of power being consumed.

In this thesis, an integrated system-level power consumption model is devised for 5G base station multi-beam transmitter topologies and beamforming schemes, which accounts for the use cases and architectures missing from the literature. The model is then applied to novel use cases in the enhanced urban Mobile Broadband (eMBB) scenario to obtain the estimated power consumption per component, per array and per user for five different beamforming schemes. A thorough parametric analysis is conducted for the optimality and trade-offs of each use case. Recommendations are made on the optimal topology, beamforming scheme and front-end technology from a power consumption perspective. Initial results show that the choice of technology, architecture and topology can lead to an improvement in the per-user power consumption of 41-80%.