Bol, DavidLouveaux, JérômeGolard, LouisLouisGolard2025-05-142025-05-142025-05-142021https://hdl.handle.net/2078.2/22686Despite global warming, the environmental impact of mobile communications tends to grow with the dramatical mobile data traffic increase. Among all the components of mobile networks, a significant part of the power consumption is attributable to the base stations constituting the broadband radio access networks (RANs). In recent years, it has been announced that 5G can reduce the energy consumption of the RANs while supporting the expected growth of data traffic. This work aims to estimate the absolute total energy consumption of mobile broadband RANs in Belgium for 2020 and to forecast it for 2025 using different 5G deployment scenarios. The current 4G networks and base station power models are determined based on data and real measurements of a Belgian operator. The relationship between the 4G base station power consumption and the average traffic is linear with a static power offset. The results of this work show that the base stations are lightly loaded on average and the static energy consumption accounts for more than 80% of the total consumption in 2020. Using a sleep mode feature, 5G base stations could reduce their power consumption by about 60% and achieve 10 times better energy efficiency than 4G base stations. However, with full 5G deployment, annual data traffic volumes could reach over 1 400 PB in 2025 which is more than three times higher than in 2020. With sleep mode in 5G base stations, the related increase in total energy consumption is 27%. Without sleep mode, it is more than 80%. On the contrary, with no 5G deployment, the total energy consumption only increases by 17% with a two-fold mobile data traffic growth. Excluding the 4G decommissioning scenario, it appears that the 5G non-deployment one is the best in terms of RAN energy consumption, in spite of a lower overall energy efficiency. Using a rough estimate of base station embodied greenhouse gas emissions, there is also a clear upward trend of direct carbon footprint, especially when the deployment of 5G is extensive. Therefore, there is room to optimise the total energy consumption of mobile networks in order to achieve our climate targets.5G power consumptionMobile RANCarbon footprintEnergy footprint4G modelingBase stationPower model5G modelingSleep modetext::thesis::master thesisthesis:30668