ITU and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have agreed a new standard to measure the energy efficiency of mobile radio access networks (RANs), the wireless networks that connect end-user equipment to the core network.
The standard is the first to define energy-efficiency metrics and measurement methods for live RANs, providing a common reference to evaluate their performance. Its application will build uniformity in the methodologies employed by such evaluations, in parallel establishing a common basis for the interpretation of the results.
“Improving the energy efficiency of ICT has become central to all fields of technical standardization at ITU,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “We are moving towards a world that will host billions of connected devices, things and objects, making energy efficiency essential to the functionality and environmental sustainability of ICT networks.”
Luis Jorge Romero, ETSI Director General: “ETSI has a track record of developing market-driven standards and specifications to deliver improved energy efficiency in telecommunications networks and equipment. We are particularly pleased by the result of this cooperation which has produced ITU-T L.1330 and the technically equivalent ETSI ES 203 228.”
The new standard, Recommendation ITU-T L.1330 “Energy efficiency measurement and metrics for telecommunication network”, was developed by ITU-T Study Group 5 in cooperation with the ETSI Technical Committee on Environmental Engineering and in liaison with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the GSM Association (GSMA).
ITU-T L.1330 accounts for the fact that optimizing the energy efficiency of equipment within a network does not guarantee the optimization of its overall energy efficiency. The standard takes a more comprehensive view of a RAN, incorporating impacts on energy efficiency caused by the interactions of interconnected equipment within complex networks.
The scope of the standard extends to radio base stations, backhauling systems, radio controllers and other infrastructure radio-site equipment. The technologies covered are GSM, UMTS and LTE (including LTE-Advanced).
ITU-T L.1330 offers a pragmatic measurement approach that focuses on the performance of ‘partial’ networks to extrapolate estimates of the energy efficiency of ‘total’ networks. It provides for a total network to be defined by topologic, geographic or demographic boundaries, enabling estimations of the energy efficiency of an operator’s network, a country or continent’s networks, or networks distinguished by their coverage of urban or rural areas. The result of these estimations is captured by an ‘assessment report’, the form of which is detailed by the standard.
