Energy consumption of radio access networks in Finland

Energy consumption of radio access networks is related to the speed and volume of mobile data traffic. Finland aims to achieve two conflicting targets by 2015, the one of 100 Mbps user data rate provision to nearly all citizens and the other of the reduction of Information and Communications Technology industry carbon footprint. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the energy consumption for several radio access networks deployment scenarios. Mobile operators can advance energy efficiency through (1) energy optimization of individual sites and (2) choice of energy efficient network deployment strategies. Models for the site power consumption, the average site traffic load factor and the average subscription mobile data traffic, are developed. The results show a reduction of energy consumption for mobile network based on LTE radio access technology which operates at 1800 MHz in urban region and 800 MHz in suburban and rural regions. In the dense urban region the LTE base stations are installed on the existing sites and in the less-dense urban region, wide-to-local area offloading is required.