4G/5G collaborative intelligent energy-saving management

As we all know, climate change is the biggest challenge we humans face in the next few decades. As a result, all the global industries are accelerating action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Based on the inherent requirements of promoting sustainable development, China announced the goal and vision of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. The project actively responds to the national dual-carbon policy and promotes the sustainable development of communication networks green, efficient, and intelligent direction.

While in Mobile Industry, the biggest problem is the power consumption of a single 5G station, which is about four times that of a single 4G station. With the expansion of the 5G network construction scale, the energy consumption problem of communication network equipment has become increasingly prominent. As one of the world’s largest telecom operators, China Unicom has built hundreds of thousands of 5G base stations. Therefore, we proposed the 4G/5G collaborative intelligent energy-saving management project to reduce energy consumption and protect the environment.

4G/5G collaborative intelligent energy-saving management project positively integrates telecom traffic data with base stations energy data and network performance data to achieve network traffic prediction and energy consumption tracking.

The project proposes a 4G and 5G collaborative intelligent energy-saving scheme and platform. This scheme uses the historical business data of the cells in the selected area of the network to build a business load prediction model of base stations and generate the optimal network energy-saving strategy. The solution proposed in the project can accurately predict the base station’s business volume and real-time monitoring and automatically develop energy-saving strategies to achieve network-level intelligent energy-saving based on heterogeneous network intellectual collaboration.

Having been piloted in Tianjin and other provinces of China, it shows that the project can reduce the contradiction between mobile communication network data growth and the problem of high energy consumption. According to statistics, the energy-saving platform saves more than 10% of base station electricity. What is more, the project can count base station energy consumption and provide support and reference for government guidance and decision-making.

In May 2021, the “4G / 5G collaborative intelligent energy-saving management” project of China Unicom research institute won the Champion Award of WSIS ICT electronic environment group of ITU World Summit on the information society. It is the only Chinese enterprise that won this honor in electronic environmental protection this year.

In the future, China Unicom will continue to carry out research and innovation of intelligent energy-saving technologies to improve the application of decarbonization and reduce energy consumption. And we hope this project will help build a good and sustainable communication network infrastructure for the information society and promote the digital transformation and low-carbon development of all industries through 5G.

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