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Mobile data, including voice as data (million Tbytes) 0.8c 45c 493–753
Share of mobile data in total mobile traffic (%) 37.5c 98c 99.6
Mobile data traffic per 3G+ data subscription (Gbytes) 5c 27c 120–184
Average data traffic per base station site (Mb/s) 0.062 1.5 11–18
aGartner Research b ABI Research c Cisco Visual Networking Index, * per site and standard, actual site
count is less but sites require more power due to collocation
Table 1. Statistical data and projections of global mobile network characteristics for the years 2007, 2014,
and 2020.
additional broadband connection for backhaul. planet (which yields over 75 million devices by
According to Berg Insight, there could be about 2020), the M2M traffic is less than 0.3 Gbytes/per-
12 million femto cells with about 70 million son — negligible compared to the estimated 100
users on a regular basis in 2014. A rough extrap- Gbytes data traffic per person in 2020. Addition-
olation suggests about 100 million femto cells ally, if only the actual modem part is allocated to
with about 500 million users in 2020. The effect be a part of the mobile network, which seems rea-
of additional femto cells on the carbon footprint sonable, the carbon footprint due to manufactur-
is discussed later. ing and operation of M2M communication will be
small, even for a vast number of existing devices
MACHINE-TO-MACHINE COMMUNICATION in 2020. An exception might be video cameras
Currently there are about 75 million machine-to- (e.g. for security applications) sending real-time
machine (M2M) subscriptions worldwide, which video. Here, the key question is to what extent
are projected to triple until 2014 with a CAGR of mobile networks will carry such traffic, which is
26 percent, a growth rate similar to that of mobile beyond the scope of this study.
subscriptions in recent years. Optimistic predic-
tions envision 50 billion connected devices by
2020. Despite the potential for rapid growth, we CARBON FOOTPRINT OF MOBILE
expect M2M communication to have only a
marginal impact on the overall carbon footprint
COMMUNICATIONS: THE
of mobile communications. Due to low activity ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
levels and small capacity per link requirements,
M2M data traffic is expected to be small com- Assessing the ecological impact of mobile com-
pared to traffic originating from human users and munications requires the study of a series of fac-
their video demands. Assuming an average of 50 tors related to production, operation, and
bytes/min/device and 10 devices/person on the distribution of mobile communication networks
Mto CO2e
200 170 Mto CO2e in 2014 19%
account installation of new and removal of old
equipment each year, the global average of base
150 86 Mto CO2e in 2007
station site power amounts to about 1.7 kW in 29%
2007 and reduces to about 1.2 kW in 2020. The 38%
study further assumes a roll-out model assuming 100
between 600,000 and 675,000 sites newly 45%
50
deployed, and up to 300,000 sites taken out of 30%
32%
service each year. 0 29%
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
Femto Cells — The power consumption of a Year
femto cell today is around 10 W, it will be
around 6 W in 2012, and it can be assumed that Figure 3. Global carbon footprint of mobile communications projected until
a femto cell in 2020 will still consume about 5 2020.
W (if the power consumption for the fixed line
connection is also included). An estimated
number of 100 million femto cells in 2020 will 2) Over the whole period of study, individual
consume about 4.4 TWh/year, which is less than footprints of RAN operation and production of
5 percent than consumed by the global RAN. mobile devices dominate the overall carbon foot-
Given this rather small impact and high uncer- print. Accordingly, initiatives aimed at carbon
tainty of deployment estimates, we exclude footprint reduction of the mobile communica-
femto cells in the RAN energy consumption tions sector should focus on these two cate-
model. While femto cells consume a rather gories. While RAN operation was by far the
small amount of energy, their positive impact largest contributor in 2007, mobile device manu-
on data traffic and capacity, resulting in an facturing will become increasingly important
energy consumption decrease, could indeed be until both have an equal share in the overall car-
larger, which is, however, beyond the scope of bon footprint in 2020. The reason for this is that
this study. smartphones and laptops represent an actively
increasing fraction of the devices accessing the
GLOBAL CARBON FOOTPRINT FORECAST network — a trend driven by the demand for
The estimated development of the global mobile advanced wireless services and applications,
footprint in the period from 2007 to 2020, includ- especially video. Compared to regular phones,
ing end-user equipment, operators’ business smartphones and laptops have carbon footprints
activities, and data traffic, is depicted in Fig. 3. almost two times and ten times higher, respec-
We would like to emphasize five major observa- tively. This effect is not fully considered in [5],
tions. which claims a reduction in the fraction of the
1) According to the projection, the overall footprint due to mobile devices, as further
carbon footprint of mobile communications detailed in the next section.
increases almost linearly until 2020 with annual 3) The footprint of data centers and data
increase of 11 Mto CO 2 e, an increase equiva- transport will experience the strongest growth
lent to the annual emissions of the whole of among all contributions until 2020 due to a dras-
Luxembourg or 2.5 million EU households. The tic increase in mobile data traffic volume in the
emissions in 2020 amount to more than 235 coming years. The scenario considered here uses
Mto CO 2 e, which corresponds to more than a high data traffic model with a CAGR of 60
one third of the present annual emissions of the percent between 2015 and 2020. Reducing the
entire United Kingdom. Relative to 2007, the CAGR of mobile traffic volume to 50 percent
overall carbon footprint will increase by a fac- during that period would lead to 33 percent less
tor of 2 until 2014 and a factor of 2.7 until CO 2 e emissions from data centers and data
2020. In the event that only minor efficiency transport in 2020.
improvements of base station sites and end-user 4) Combining the estimates presented in
equipment occur, the footprint could even Figs. 2 and 3 yields the carbon footprint per
increase more than threefold. In contrast, the average mobile subscription, which is predicted
footprint of the ICT sector as a whole is expect- to increase just slightly from 28 kg CO 2 e in
ed to increase by a factor of only 1.72 during 2007 to about 31 kg CO2e in 2020, as shown in
the same 13-year period [5]. Observing the Fig. 4. The reason is that technological
footprint of RAN sites’ manufacturing and con- advances, decreasing energy consumption of
struction in Fig. 3 suggests that the contribution newly deployed base station sites (8
coming from the so-called embodied energy of percent/year), and decreasing operation and
RANs — as recently considered by some manufacturing emissions of laptops (5
authors — will remain minor compared to RAN percent/year) in particular, keep pace with the
operation. growing subscriber base.
TWh
60 49 TWh
an increase from 49 TWh in 2007 to about 109 48 TWh: Large swap of eq.
TWh in 2020 for scenario 1. The savings resulting 40 Green mobile communications
2007
2020
from continuous improvements in scenario 2 are 1000x total traffic
20 3x base station sites
below 10 percent since technology expectedly 1x RAN energy cons.
only spreads out slowly into the network via roll- 0
out of new sites. Additional energy efficiency
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
20 7
18
19
20
1
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
related innovations coming from dedicated initia-
tives yield a reduction of another 10 percent, Year
which is intuitive since we assumed an average
efficiency gain per site of 50 percent in scenario Figure 5. Global RAN electricity consumption projected until 2020 for different
3. Powering new off-grid sites by alternative ener- scenarios of RAN development.
gy after 2012 in scenario 4 yields a small reduc-
tion globally, since the number of newly installed
off-grid sites is expected to be small compared to In effect, ARPU is decreasing globally. For
the already existing base of equipment. The accu- instance, Vodafone Germany reports an ARPU
mulated savings coming from new technologies shrinking annually by over 6 percent on average
rolled out, according to current considerations on from around €30 in 2000 to around €16 in 2009.
coverage and capacity extension, is projected to The hundredfold increase in data traffic per sub-
be on the order of 15 percent in 2020 compared scriber, as projected in this and other studies
to the case of continuous improvements. (Table 1), cannot be expected to translate into
An additional reduction in global RAN ener- corresponding revenue per user since the rev-
gy consumption can be realized if the base equip- enue per bit will be minute for a majority of
ment installed is optimized for energy efficiency. future traffic,2 and the proliferation of flat rate
In our numerical study, we swapped about 37 data subscriptions will ultimately bound poten-
percent of equipment in different proportions tial revenue gains of the skyrocketing mobile
till 2020 to obtain an overall energy reduction of data volumes. Similar trends can be observed for
50 percent globally in 2020 compared to the con- classical voice traffic, where operators report
tinuous improvements. While one has to that revenue per call has dropped by an order of
acknowledge the simplicity of a trend analysis five percent annually over the last few years, and
compared to the complexity that swap-outs and combined flat rates for fixed and mobile connec-
modernizations entail in practice, this scenario tions are becoming standard. Taking into
still illustrates the potential of energy efficiency account that quasi-full mobile penetration can
improving technologies. be expected globally during 2012 (Fig. 2), it
The trend analysis presented in Fig. 5 further becomes obvious that overall network operators’
reveals that a thousandfold increase in bit-per- revenues will stay flat in the future, and revenue
Joule efficiency as envisioned by current initia- models are to become more cost-driven.
tives is indeed within reach for mobile networks. If we consider the global average energy con-
sumption as a rough estimate for individual net-
ENERGY COST AND REVENUE OF work operators, relying on continuing efficiency
MOBILE SERVICES IN MATURE MARKETS improvements of 8 percent annually for newly
installed sites will double the energy cost by
The energy bill due to network operation will 2020; a 50 percent increase in energy prices by
gain increasing importance in cellular business 2020 will most likely triple them!
models. Assuming a power requirement of 1.7kW
on average and 800 subscribers per site with an OFF-GRID SITES AND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY
average revenue per user (ARPU) of $20/mo, SOURCES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
and energy costs of $0.15/kWh (common for
mature western markets), the annual energy bill In order to facilitate the availability and use of
can be shown by straightforward calculation to be mobile communications all around the globe, the 2 While classical mobile
around 1 percent of the overall network earnings exploitation of alternative energy sources for site messaging generates rev-
before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortiza- operation is essential, and highly energy-efficient enue on the order of sever-
tion (EBITDA)! An increase in the number of base station equipment is the key enabler for al tens of dollars per
subscriptions cannot be expected to change the alternative energy technologies to be applicable. megabyte, web browsing
situation in fully penetrated markets. Customer Despite the rapid spread of mobile communica- related traffic generates
surveys suggest that the share of mobile commu- tions around the globe, as of today there are still average revenue in the
nication services in the annual expenditure per about 1 billion people worldwide who do not range of only several dol-
physical customer is constant; thus, the attainable have access to any telecommunications services. lars per megabyte. The
revenue per physical person with wireless services More often than not, the lack of infrastructure revenue per megabyte of
is flat. ARPU, understood as revenue per sub- (transport and electricity grid) prevents provi- streaming video services is
scription, thus tends to decrease, according to the sioning of cost-efficient access to wireless com- about two orders of mag-
increase in subscriptions once certain market munications. Part of the reason for the lack of nitude less, at around
maturity has been attained. mobile services is that the ratio of energy cost $0.01/Mbyte.
and revenue, as discussed above for western [4] ABI Research, “Mobile Networks Go Green,” report,
2008.
Conditioned on countries, is much worse when considering an [5] The Climate Group, “SMART2020: Enabling the Low
ARPU of $3 dollars/mo and higher energy cost Carbon Economy in the Information Age,” 2008.
quick implementa- of $0.20/kWh, as is common for developing [6] IPCC, 4th Assessment Report, Chapter 2: “Changes in
tion and alongside countries, arriving at an estimate of around 10 Atmospheric Constituents and Radiative Forcing,”
http://www.ipcc.ch.
other “classical” percent of overall revenue before interest and [7] Cisco, Visual Networking Index, “Global Mobile Data
tax. Since ARPU increases rather slowly in Traffic Forecast Update, 2009–2014,” white paper,
improvements of the developing countries, the key here also lies in 2010.
reduction of electricity cost. If there is no elec- [8] Alcatel-Lucent, “Eco-Sustainable Wireless Services,”
spectral efficiency of white paper, 2009.
trical grid to power network equipment, opera- [9] G. Auer et al., “The EARTH Project: Towards Energy Effi-
mobile networks, tors have to resort to diesel powered sites more cient Wireless Networks,” Future Network and Mobile
green mobile often than not. The transport of diesel to remote Summit, 2010.
sites roughly doubles the cost per gallon com- [10] J. Malmodin, “Carbon Footprint of Mobile Communi-
communication cations and ICT,” Proc. Joint Int’l. Congress and Exhibi-
pared to the price at the pump, which often tion Electronics Goes Green 2008+, Berlin, Germany,
technologies offer makes conventional business models infeasible. Sept. 2008.
the potential to serve Here, alternate energy sources can provide a
three orders of
feasible alternative. However, as of today, the BIOGRAPHIES
number of RBS sites powered by alternate ener- ALBRECHT FEHSKE (albrecht.fehske@ifn.et.tu-dresden.de) is a
magnitude more gy is quite small. For instance, Alcatel-Lucent Ph.D. student at the Vodafone Chair at Technische Univer-
traffic with three reported having installed only about 300 solar sität (TU) Dresden. He earned his Dipl.-Ing. (diploma in
powered RBS sites globally as of 2009, but envi- engineering) degree from TU Dresden in 2007. During his
times the number of studies he spent one year at the Virginia Polytechnic Insti-
sions a global market potential of more than tute and State University (Virginia Tech), and worked in the
sites but the same 100,000 sites in 2012 [8]. Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group at Virginia
Tech, where he was involved in research related to machine
overall energy learning algorithms and signal classification for cognitive
consumption
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION radio systems. In 2006 he worked at Vodafone Group R&D
in Newbury, England, where he looked at scheduling algo-
as of today. This article quantifies the global carbon footprint rithms for streaming traffic in HSDPA. His current research
of mobile communications, and discusses its eco- focuses on physical layer energy efficiency modeling and
logical and economic implications. We predict an optimization of cellular networks.
increase of emissions by a factor of three between JENS MALMODIN (jens.malmodin@ericsson.com) joined Erics-
2007 and 2020 rising to about 235 Mto CO2e. son Research in 1995 to work on environmental issues and
Production of mobile devices and global RAN life cycle assessments at the RBS basic technology research
operation will remain the major contributors, unit, where he is currently responsible for Ericsson’s environ-
mental data reporting system. Between 2003 and 2006 he
accompanied by an increasing share of emissions also worked on product requirements and energy efficiency
due to data transfer in the backbone. for WCDMA RBS system design. He is currently a member of
Energy consumption of RANs will play an EMF Safety and Sustainability at Ericsson Research. He holds
increasing role in mobile operators’ business an M.Sc. in material engineering from the Royal Institute of
Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden.
models. Technologies to reduce energy con-
sumption of global RANs are a key enabler for GERGELY BICZOK (biczok@tmit.bme.hu) is a postdoctoral fel-
the spread of mobile communications in devel- low at the Norwegian University of Science and Technolo-
oping countries. Conditioned on quick imple- gy. He earned his Ph.D. at Budapest University of
Technology and Economics. in 2010. He spent one year at
mentation and alongside other “classical” Northwestern University as a Fulbright visiting researcher
improvements of the spectral efficiency of mobile from 2007 to 2008. He was also a research fellow at Erics-
networks, green mobile communication tech- son Research from 2003 to 2007. His research focuses on
nologies offer the potential to serve three orders socio-economic aspects of computer networks, data cen-
ters and network coding.
of magnitude more traffic with three times the
number of sites but the same overall energy con- GERHARD FETTWEIS (Gerhard.Fettweis@vodafone-chair.com)
sumption as of today. earned his Ph.D. from RWTH Aachen in 1990. Thereafter he
was a visiting scientist at IBM Research in San Jose, Califor-
nia, working on disk drive read/write channels. From 1991
ACKNOWLEDGMENT to 1994 he was a scientist with TCSI, Berkeley, California,
developing cellular phone chipsets. Since 1994 he is Voda-
The research leading to these results has received fone Chair Professor at TU Dresden, Germany, with current-
funding from the European Community’s Seventh ly 20 companies from Asia, Europe, and the United States
sponsoring his research. He is a Distinguished Speaker of
Framework Program ([FP7/2007–2013]) under IEEE SSCS, and a recipient of the Alcatel-Lucent Research
grant agreement no. 247733, “The EARTH Pro- Award and IEEE Millennium Medal. He has spun out nine
ject.” startups. He was TPC Chair of IEEE ICC 2009 (Dresden), and
has organized many other events. He was elected Member-
REFERENCES at-Large of IEEE SSCS (1999–2004) and ComSoc
(1998–2000). He served as Associate Editor for IEEE JSAC
[1] Gartner, “Green IT: The New Industry Shockwave,” (1998–2000) and IEEE Transactions CAS-II (1993–1996).
Gartner Symp. ITxpo, Apr. 2007. From 1991 to 1998 he was ComSoc’s delegate within the
[2] G. Fettweis and E. Zimmermann, “ICT Energy Consump- IEEE Solid State Circuits Council. He is a member of Com-
tion — Trends and Challenges,” WPMC 2008. Soc’s Awards Standing Committee and the IEEE Fellow
[3] J. Malmodin et al., “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Committee, and is active in ComSoc Technical Committees
Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment (Communication Theory, Wireless). During 2008–2009 he
& media Sectors,” J. Industrial Ecology, 2010. chaired the Germany Chapter of IEEE IT Society.