The effect of free cooling on reducing total energy consumption for telecommunication base stations

Abstract

The number of telecommunication base stations is increasing all over the world due to an ever increasing communication demand. As a result, energy savings play an important role in our future and sustainable network architecture. In a typical base station, electronics cooling normally accounts for 25-50% of the total energy consumption, traditionally provided by air conditioning systems. The service life of air conditioning systems can be considerably reduced by applying energy-efficient free cooling systems to the cooling setup. For an indoor temperature set point of 25 °C, free cooling can cover 16-93% of the total cooling demand depending on the location of the base stations. When adjusting to a higher indoor temperature set point, the savings will increase accordingly.