Discussions about the benefits of upgrading radio access network (RAN) infrastructure sometimes overlook a key factor: sustainability. Virtualized RAN (vRAN) and open RAN solutions can contribute significantly to sustainability goals by boosting energy efficiency and reducing carbon footprints.

With new environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting requirements, leaders, experts, and operators (LEOs) are forced to consider the environmental impacts of their networks. Every company must now exhibit responsibility for how it utilizes resources, consumes energy, and disposes of waste.

Many communication service providers (CSPs) have already adopted sustainability principles and initiated bold programs to lower their carbon footprint. With their emphasis on information and communications technology (ICT), CSPs are tasked with making major changes to how their networks operate.

The ICT sector accounts for up to 10% of the world’s energy usage. With connectivity expanding, mobile devices proliferating, and new services such as 5G being rolled out broadly, ICT’s share of global electricity consumption is set to grow quickly.

Since 2000, processors have become 7.6-times larger and require 4.6-times more power. The number of cores in a processor will reach 288 by the end of 2024, a tenfold increase since 2017. Some forecasts suggest that by 2030, the world’s wired and wireless networks will make up more than 20.9% of global electricity demand. By that time, the installed power capacity of data centers will reach nearly 170 gigawatts, almost half of which will be for artificial intelligence (AI).

The latest 5G technology will contribute to this spike. The GSMA estimates that the potential 1,000-times increase in data traffic unleashed by 5G – along with the new infrastructure to support it – could double or even triple the industry’s overall energy consumption.

This makes it challenging to achieve carbon neutrality. If CSPs are to make serious headway in implementing more sustainable operations they need to adopt some bold strategies to make a real difference in the industry’s carbon footprint.

One study from the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) suggests that if we can work smarter and manage workloads more effectively, the ICT industry can enable a 20% reduction in global greenhouse emissions by 2030. GeSI also estimates that the emissions avoided by more efficient ICT solutions could add up to nearly 10-times more than the emissions generated by implementing them.

It all starts with network design; legacy architectures have no place in a sustainable future. For CSPs, the biggest energy challenge is RAN. According to the NextG Alliance, RAN accounts for more than half of all energy consumption in the network. Back in 2017, one study found that RAN base stations alone accounted for about 57% of total power usage in cellular networks. CSPs can make a sizable dent in their overall energy consumption by adopting virtualized, cloud-based infrastructure and open RAN designs.

Virtualized RAN and open RAN designs that utilize cloud-based network resources are a proven way to reduce data center and network power consumption, improve resource efficiency, and reduce waste. They utilize power-efficient hardware, tools to track hardware and software energy consumption, and intelligence, orchestration, and automation features to improve energy efficiency.

VMware by Broadcom provides the right platform to transition the RAN from legacy to virtualized to open RAN architectures. The Telco Cloud solutions from VMware includes a RAN-optimized platform that disaggregates RAN software from legacy, purpose-built hardware, along with automation and orchestration features to manage the platform’s lifecycle.

This minimizes wasteful or redundant operations, with visibility into RAN elements that can be consolidated or migrated for more power savings. Other energy-saving orchestration features include:

• The traffic-based RAN Energy Saving rApp that monitors traffic load across the network, and then idles or shuts down sectors of a cell site when no traffic is going through.
• Radio unit (RU) energy-saving features (depending on RU capabilities) that can switch off components, such as power amplifiers, when no transmission is required.
• Multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) intelligence that can turn off some MIMO branches and send traffic through the remaining ones (switching from four branches to two, or even two to one) when utilization dips below certain thresholds.
• Band-steering intelligence to move traffic to the most energy-efficient band. For example, shifting from 4G to 5G when 5G coverage and penetration are high enough, which consumes as little as one-tenth the power.
• Reducing the truck rolls needed to expand 5G rollouts by streamlining the deployment of virtualized and open RAN functions

In addition to energy savings from AI-enabled orchestration, automation reduces the time it takes to add cell sites by as much as 80% – and is more cost-effective. Using VMware Telco Cloud portfolio to disaggregate RAN software from legacy proprietary hardware amounts to 30% total cost of ownership (TCO) savings over three years.

These innovations add up to huge cost and energy savings. As you scale across thousands of base stations, small efficiencies add up to massive improvements in energy consumption and emissions.