Topical: Energy Issues
Date: Tuesday October 1
Time: 11:00 – 18:30
Room: Conference Room 2
Agenda:
Time Title Speaker
| 11:00 – 11:10 | Session overview | Chair |
| 11:10 – 11:50 | Energy at the Operator | Eamon Heskin, T-Mobile |
| 11:50 – 12:30 | RAN energy issues below 6 GHz | Earl McCune, Eridan |
| 12:30 – 14:00 | Lunch break | |
| 14:00 – 14:45 | Energy in the Digital Core | Jaafar Elmirghani, Univ. Leeds UK |
| 14:45 – 15:30 | RAN energy at mm Wave frequencies | Earl McCune, TU Delft |
| 15:30 – 16:00 | Break | |
| 16:00 – 16:40 | Software impact on energy consumption | Rishad Shafik, Univ. Newcastle UK |
| 16:40 – 17:20 | Differentiated Silicon technology solutions for energy efficient IOT & mm-Wave Radio | Anirban Bandyopadhyay, GlobalFoundries |
| 17:30 – 18:30 | Open Panel with all speakers and audience | All |
Chair and Organizer: Earl McCune
Energy draw of cellular communications networks has not been a design concern in past and present standardization activities. Implementations of present standards do take interest in energy draw, particularly in RAN infrastructure (e.g. adoption of Doherty power amplifiers). Yet cellular networks have grown to the size where energy cost is a dominant item in their OpEx. For the coming 5G transition, if this new network is scaled according to most network growth visions, on the present path there is not enough electricity on this planet to operate that network. This event will emphasize how broad the energy problem actually is, and therefore how widely we need to look for solutions.
So what can we do? 5G needs to happen, but it also must be profitable to operate at full scale. In the spirit of ‘you can only control what you can observe,’ in this session we will present observations of energy draw from many aspects of a cellular network. Each presentation will illustrate the present situation of power draw, investigate why this particular situation exists, and finally propose one or more paths which may be available to reduce energy draw while not impacting network performance. There are a small number of speakers so that each can give more in-depth presentations on their particular aspect of 5G/network energy draw, along with outlining some physically realizable ideas for candidate solutions.
Presentations will cover:
- Energy draw from an Operator perspective
- Energy draw of the RAN and future options
- Energy draw of the digital core and future options
- Energy aspects of the edge-computing transition
- Energy impacts of software design (particularly for IoT)
- Implementation technology capabilities – particularly for mmW implementations of 5G-NR
For the final hour there will be a panel discussion with all presenters available to engage with the audience. Here everyone has an opportunity to further focus on particular points regarding network energy draw.