Control and optimisation of power consumption in radio base stations

Global environmental concerns and the ever-increasing need for energy, coupled with a steady progress in renewable energy technologies, are opening up new opportunities for the use of alternative energy resources for telecommunications applications and different components and technologies are today ready to be used. More efficient methods of managing the components behavior need to be investigated in order to optimize the site power solutions using different sources. In this paper a system to reduce and optimize the energy consumption on a typical Radio Base System is proposed and described. Moreover, in order to guarantee the safe and reliable operation of such hybrid systems, suitable condition monitoring and diagnostic techniques still need to be developed and investigated as well as fault-tolerant operating strategies. Some major results of applying the developed system to a real RBS are presented together with some advance information of future developments. © 2011 IEEE.