ABSTRACT
Forecasting communications network peak and average power consumption provide important guidance for comparing future deployment strategies. Peak power provides an indication of the requirements for network power provisioning over the entire diurnal cycle, including peak traffic times. Average power forecasts provide an indication of future network energy and carbon footprints. These will be important for determining carbon offsets and other carbon abatement strategies.
Highly accurate forecasting will require a significant amount of information on network equipment and deployment architectures. This chapter adopts a more statistically based approach; the amount of required information is reduced and the modelling can be significantly simplified. Although the accuracy of the forecasts will also be reduced, in many cases, this reduction is not significant.
A further advantage of the approximate model described in this chapter is that it can be applied to develop year-on-year forecasts of the growth in network power consumption. With the knowledge of peak and average traffic growth as well as technology improvement trends (which are available), this model can enable network planners to determine upper and lower bounds for future network growth. With additional information on scheduling the replacement of old equipment with new generation equipment, more detailed peak and average power forecasts can be constructed.
