Breakthrough in international project to optimise energy demand for mobile networks

Aimed at developing a new methodology for reducing the energy consumption of mobile networks with the BME’s participation, the international SAMBAS project has been completed. SAMBA stands for sustainable and adaptive ultra-high capacity micro base stations.

The primary goal of the three-and-a-half-year programme was to reduce the energy required for the operation of the increasingly stressed networks. The secondary goal was to make the energy used renewable, environmentally friendly and locally available such as solar and wind energy, or energy obtained from vibrations (kinetic) and thermal differences (thermal).

This is important because as the newer generations of mobile networks require higher data rates, they use higher frequencies, thus resulting in higher energy consumption. “Meanwhile, at higher frequencies distances you can bride shorter distances and communication is more sensitive to distractions and terrain obstacles,” explained to bme.hu Tibor Cinkler, university professor of the Department of Telecommunications and Artificial Intelligence and the project leader from the BME.

Therefore, a solution is needed that can provide the desired quality of service and availability while reducing consumption and servicing all users. These criteria contradict each other, so optimisation is required. Within the SAMBAS project, the BME research team developed a framework to optimize the operation of millimeter-wavelength (mmWave) micro base stations, which efficiently utilises renewable energy sources and combines this with extremely energy-efficient hardware and communication protocols, thus reducing traditional network consumption by 99 percent.

In other words, on the one hand, the solution reduces consumption, and on the other hand, if consumption cannot be reduced further, it supplies energy locally from renewable sources.

The team has developed a series of steps to achieve the optimal compromise:

• Idle base stations are shut down;

• Traffic is diverted to ensure that there are as many idle base stations as possible (which can thus be temporarily shut down);

• The number of power-consuming on/off cycles are minimised for mobile users;

• Consumption is made proportional to the load;

• The network is split into quality and traffic categories in order to ensure the quality of critical traffic even in a reduced operation due to energy savings;

• Multiple user assignments to network radio points to significantly improve availability even with a small energy increase;

• Preference is given to locally produced renewable energy.

The consortium that developed the innovative process was led by the University of Antwerp (Belgium), and in addition to the BME, its members included the University of Ghent (Belgium), the University of Poitiers (France), the University of Essex (UK) and the French consultancy firm Sodira-Connect. Hungary’s participation was financed by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office in the amount of over HUF 60 million.

“Deutsche Telekom has already taken note of our achievements: the contract will soon be signed, on the basis of which the German telecommunication giant will build a new cooperation on the competence of the BME research team,” said Tibor Cinkler.

Rector's Office, Directorate of Communications