Energy-Aware Design Considerations for Ethernet-Based 5G Mobile Fronthaul Networks

Communication networks are not only important to society, they also consume a lot of energy. Recent years research has focused on Cloud-Radio Access Network (CRAN) to decrease the energy consumption in mobile networks. Hence, this work investigates how to lower the energy consumption in the Ethernet based fronthaul network by choosing the right C-RAN functional split. Different functional splits assign different loads to the fronthaul network, and this work considers how much impact the data load has on the fronthaul network’s energy consumption. This work presents a model for the fronthaul energy consumption, which takes the different steps of the Ethernet switch operations into account. The outcome of this model shows the extremely high importance of choosing the right functional split when mobile networks are entering the era of 5 th Generation (5G). The impact of switch capacity and size of Ethernet packets is also considered. In a 5G worst case scenario, one switch will consume the same amount of energy as 199 households. The difference in energy consumption between the best and worst case scenario of this paper is 99.32% per switch.